The psychiatric protection order for the “battered mental patient”

Psychiatric patients are routinely treated against their will. Legally enforceable psychiatric protection orders would protect patients from coercive psychiatric interventions

The avowed desires of patients and doctors conflict more often in psychiatry than in any other branch of medicine. People known as “mental patients” are routinely subjected to “diagnostic” and “therapeutic” interventions against their will. Many such people see being committed (sectioned) and treated against their will as a personal violation—a “psychiatric abuse”—and want to protect themselves from future involuntary psychiatric hospitalisation and treatment. At present former psychiatric patients, even when legally competent, have no means to defend themselves from such a contingency.

Mental health laws—reflecting the point of view of psychiatrists and society—protect (or are said to protect) mentally ill patients from the dangers they pose, because of their illness, to themselves and others. Many mental patients view—and have always viewed—psychiatrists as posing a danger to them. Respect for the self defined interests of such patients requires that the law protect them from further unwanted psychiatric interventions.