What legal recourse were you looking for? What court battle would you have gotten into around this?
He was forced to go to a hospital, where he went into a brief 72 hour coma while he was withdrawing from alcohol. From there, he was hospitalized for another 7 days, and then forced to transfer to a physical rehabilitation center, as he was unable to walk under his own power.
Once he was at the facility, he was no longer under a required hold. Once he realized this, he promptly left so he could go home and start drinking again.
We spoke with lawyers about whether or not I could be granted conservatorship over him, as he went through this detox / early recovery period. Because he hadn't lost his mental faculties in any way, we were advised that a judge was unlikely to provide conservatorship to me, and it would be an expensive and damaging process. Our best bet was to convince him at a personal level, which is what we attempted.
Should people be allowed to drink themselves to death? Should families be powerless to help a family member with a disease that makes is so addictive, they can no longer make rational choices in relation to that substance?
It's clearly a philosophical question, and it comes down to your views on personal liberty, and whether someone suffering from deep addiction is still capable of making informed decisions.
I, personally, believe that conservatorship laws are a reasonable approach to helping people get over the initial hump of detox and then understanding their addiction. I want people to have a fighting chance to come back from the brink, and we lacked the legal right to do so, in this case.
If you're fat and likely to die of heart disease, should your family be allowed to physically restrain you from buying another burger?
What about cigarettes, can you lock them up to force them to quit?
If you ride too fast should they be able to force you to sell your motorbike?
Should they be able to stop you from free-climbing?
I don't see how this is relevant to the question, unless you want to get into whether their burden on the medical system outweighs their right to do what they want with their bodies (but lung cancer/emphezema, diabetes/heart disease, and traumatic injuries from extreme sports would fall into that category as well).
> Smoking and junk food don’t have the huge impacts to how you treat those around you that being drunk all the time does.
We don't lock up sober assholes for being assholes either.
The question is: where does someone's right to do what their brain makes them want to do end? Individual autonomy is a big deal in a free society, as it should be. When you take away a person's freedom to act, I think you take away part of what makes them human.
Probably we all do this at some level. Hopefully we can encourage each other to do the right thing, but most of us won't at least some of the time. And, sometimes the other party really doesn't know best or understand all the circumstances.
However, incarcerating people against their will, forcing them to take medication against their will, possibly for months, is problematic.
We might tolerate that if it worked, but from the evidence we have we don't think it will work for many people with substance misuse.
Addiction treatment is hard. I don't know many people working in addiction treatment who are asking for more legal powers to detain people.
In England I sometimes speak to people with substance misuse disorders (comorbid with mental illness, or learning disability, or autism, or a mix). Many of them will have been detained for mental illness (they were not detained because of substance misuse). It's fair to say they have mixed views about compulsory treatment. Some of them hate it and think it caused them harm. Some of them think it was transformative. It is complicated.
People are asking how much capacity a person has if they are addicted.
There are roughly two camps when we talk about a human rights approach to mental health law, and they're not compatible with each other.
The more mainstream version is to look at the UN Declaration of Human Rights, which flows into the EU Convention on Human Rights, which flows into national law. Under this system we can still have detention under mental health law, forced medication, and substituted decision making. But you do need some protections in place to prevent arbitrary detention and to give people a right of appeal.
The less mainstream view is to look at the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities. Under this approach you cannot detain people under mental health laws, you can force them to take medication against their will, and you can only have supported decision making, you cannot have substituted decision making.
There's some discussion on the CRPD here: https://www.nationalelfservice.net/mental-health/disability-...
https://www.un.org/development/desa/disabilities/convention-...
It's also arguable that state regulated or state run health insurance should require some degree of self insurance for people making these detrimental choices.