Bloggers Unite for Human Rights!
15/05/08 18:52
This is not about stuff that is happening in faraway places, but in the United Kingdom and the USA now.
It is reported that in 2008 in the UK, people are dying almost every day, sometimes in difficult or unusual circumstances, while being detained in secure mental hospitals, but that their deaths are not being investigated. In that respect, they have fewer rights than a criminal or prisoner who dies in custody. Unlike prisoners, the families of dead patients are not automatically entitled to an inquest. The chief executive of the UK mental health charity MIND Paul Farmer said, “We are talking about the ultimate injustice; people go into hospital for a mental illness and are coming out dead.”
The problem doesn’t stop here. Jane Harris from the mental health charity Rethink has it about right, “This situation is indicative of how few rights mental health patients have. They have done nothing wrong; their only crime is to suffer from an illness, yet they have fewer rights than criminals.”
Over a third of the homeless on the streets of Britain are mentally ill. Frequently they experience difficulties in obtaining care in a system set up to address the health needs of the articulate middle class. Everyone has a right to a home. They also have a right to appropriate medical care too.
The abuse of the mentally ill and vulnerable is well-documented: Sexual assault and rape, the over-use or misuse of electro-convulsive therapy, the misuse of powerful psychotropic drugs to pacify and contain the elderly, widespread discrimination by the police and the health services...The list goes on and on.
A person who is compulsorily detained in hospital under the mental health act in the UK may appeal against their detention. But who allows that person access to an appeal? Who will hear them? Who will act for them?
People are afraid of the mentally ill. The media promulgates the view that they are dangerous or violent. Let’s squash that myth now. People who are mentally ill are no more violent than any other section of society. There are notable exceptions, madmen slaughterers like Harold Shipman and Peter Sutcliffe, the Yorkshire Ripper. But Harold Shipman was not thought to be mentally ill when he systematically slaughtered more than 200 of his patients as a practising medical doctor. It’s the exception like the “Ripper” we always hear about. But exceptions never prove the rule. I have met hundreds of people who have been diagnosed as mentally ill and have witnessed violence perhaps once or twice.
Sanity is a finely balanced state of mind. Almost everyone, every family in Britain and America, knows of someone who has suffered mental illness. At least one person in every four families in the UK and USA will suffer from a mental illness or disorder. It is very commonplace even though we might not like to look at it or think that it may happen to us.
It is way past time that we conferred the same human rights on the mentally ill as are offered to the rest of society. This includes holding carers and the health services to account for those in their care, especially if they die during the provision of that care.
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