It's clear that you haven't been one of the patients the article refers to.

Unlike Dr. Peter, I'm not generalizing the title to all psychiatrists or all interventions, but what you describe is still true.
A person may require immediate, compulsory treatment to protect them from themselves or others, but in most cases this need can be reduced to a few hours—let's say 24 hours, to be more cautious.

In practice, the invalidation of a patient's right to self-determination is granted indefinitely and is reviewed every six months.

Let's not forget that there is no objective way to measure any mental disorder, so these are subjective opinions.

There is a type of psychiatrist who listens to the patient, who sees them, who assesses them as a whole, and there is another type of psychiatrist who only sees certain symptoms that, as we know, can be shared with multiple diagnoses.

So sometimes these measures of forced confinement and medication are used unethically, or at least in dubious or questionable ways, sometimes due to disagreements between family and professional, other times at the request of relatives...

It's not the tool itself, but its use that is questionable and needs to be debated, and if this measure is intended to protect the person being treated, it can't be applied without taking that into account.

I have seen people suffer and traumatized by this practice, and to top it all off, they are the people with the fewest resources (without family or financial support), so they have fewer options for defense.

If you are not one of them, my sincere thanks, as a mother of someone affected and as a professional.

Thank you all for your presentations.

The author here distracts from a possibly important issue by raising issues such as the following:

"Psychiatrists increase the risk of suicide and violence"

Which is supported by the following reference and discussion:

"A 2014 Danish register study of 2,429 suicides showed that the closer the contact with psychiatric staff – which often involves forced treatment – the worse the outcome. Compared to people who had not received any psychiatric treatment in the preceding year, the suicide risk was 6 times increased for people receiving only psychiatric medication, 8 times for people with psychiatric outpatient contact, 28 times for people with psychiatric emergency room contacts, and 44 times for people who had been admitted to a psychiatric hospital."

Note that the assertion that "contact with psychiatric staff" "often involves forced treatment" is in no way supported by the reference (#2 in the article). Nor is it true at all, as any reasonable person knows. This diminishes our interest in their argument.

The author continues:

"Patients admitted to hospital would of course be expected to be at greatest risk of suicide because they are more ill than others (confounding by indication),"

So the author appears to know that the assertion first quoted above is not supported by the article in question. However, they continue:


"but the findings were robust and most of the potential biases in the study were conservative, i.e. favored the null hypothesis of there being no “dose-response” relationship."

This of course does nothing to support the author's claim. It only has the appearance of doing so.

There follows a long discussion that is completely divorced from the use of forced treatment.

One can only conclude that the author has a bias against the profession of psychiatry and has attempted to tar the field with a broad brush based on how it treats incarcerated individuals-- those being possibly the only patients forced into medication. The author offers no evidence of the scale of the problem or its context. (In contrast, only shadowy claims and references to non-peer-reviewed texts are cited on this key fact.)

This is not the way to raise awareness of what may in fact be a real human rights issue

Editors note: This reader comment has been edited, removing some inappropriate language.