Can't people be put into a psychiatric ward at some point?
Also keep in mind the bar for committing someone against their will is pretty high. For instance, a person with schizophrenia who is homeless and spends their days talking to voices in their head has a very poor quality of life and is likely to die due to disease, starvation or exposure, but is not suicidal and thus cannot be committed, at least not long term. Sometimes that person can be committed for a few days for evaluation and observation, but no longer.
So what you are saying is that if I voluntarily seek a therapist, I could end up committed, but if I don't, then I have to have done something bad enough for me to be in front of the judge first. And people wonder why we have such issues with our mental health care system.
(Not that I've done anything that would get me committed, but say I was feeling depressed or something... why would I risk it?)
>And people wonder why we have such issues with our mental health care system.
Genuine question: what would you want to see instead? Would you want it to be impossible to commit patients without consent, and risk more people committing suicide? I understand being frustrated with the system, but I don't see any easy answers.
There are many very rare things people take extreme precaution to avoid.
>Would you want it to be impossible to commit patients without consent, and risk more people committing suicide?
But more people would see therapists and thus less people would commit suicide overall. The choice is between a lower total suicide rate or a lower suicide rate in a subset which therapist are exposed to. And I'm not really surprised therapist opted for the one that is directly more visible.
They would much rather use a treatment method you agreed with. So if you were very depressed they would definitely be concerned. But I don't know if you would get involuntarily committed unless the difference between involuntary commitment and outpatient treatment was a life or death choice. I don't expect you could say much to a therapist that would not stay private unless there was an extremely good reason.
The threat of me using a gun, no matter how unlikely it actually is, leads to me being banned from having a gun in quite a lot of places. Also, people will often not accurate take into account the chance of something happening when deciding how they should act.
It depends where you are. That's not true for the UK, for example, where a variety of people have powers to detain under the mental health act. There's a bunch of checks and balances built in to the system so while it's not perfect it's very far away from the misinformation some people are spreading in this thread.