Then And Now:
From Physical Restraints to Chemical
Restraints
The Origins
of Mental Illness
The Baker Act
according to
Florida Statute
What Is
Transference?
What Is
Borderline Personality Disorder?
How do Psychiatric Hospitals
Reinforce Negative Behaviors?
Thomas Szasz
On Psychiatry
A Link to a site that describes
the hypocrocies of Psychiatry:
www.psychinfo.net |
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The
Fourteenth Amendment to the constitution reads
"No state shall.....deprive any person of life,
liberty, or property, without due process of the law; nor deny to any person within it's
jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws."
Yet every state has procedures that allow for the commitment of persons against their will
to institutions for the mentally ill or retarded. The original term for this involuntary
commitment was called "civil commitment" The traditional standards for civil
commitment were that the person must have been determined mentally ill and
1,dangerous to others 2,dangerous to himself 3, gravely disabled, or 4,in need of
treatment.These criteria are broad and vague. In those times any police or family member
could could have someone committed simply by obtaining a "certificate of mental
illness" signed by two physicians. Fortunately in the last three decades, the legal
system has become more attentive to the rights of physically and mentally disabled
individuals. Laws and court decisions have tightened the criteria for committing a person
to a psychiatric facility. |
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In our modern times the Involuntary Commitment is abused as
much as it was in the past. Fortunately, nowadays there are many agencies and other
resources that are readily accessible to individuals that believe that they have been
unfairly committed.
It's ironic that the greatest abuse of modern Baker Act laws isn't people being baker
Acted against their will. The greatest abuse is how frequently many individuals use the
Baker Act as an escape from their daily situations. Many people have actually
found that they get more attention in the psyche hospital than they do in society.
For this reason these people will fake mental breakdowns and make feigned suicide
attempts solely for the purpose of (for lack of a better description) "having a
vacation" in a psychiatric hospital, away from the problems of their daily life. You
may think that the hospitals would be aware of this and try to prevent admissions that
they believe are faking their mental illnesses, but the fact is that those same hospitals will support these behaviors for the benefit of the
hospital, that is, the higher the census on the ward, the greater revenue that the
hospital earns!
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