Jim Gottstein is a lawyer in Alaska and is the founder of the organization PsychRights, the Law Project for Psychiatric Rights (http://psychrights.org/) which has been around about 25 years, working to bring the mental illness system around to a culture of recovery.
He had a successful verdict for a patient in the summer of 2006, in which the patient’s rights to refuse forced drugging were upheld.
He brought to our attention a paper that he wrote and presented at a seminar in 2005 (“How the Legal System Can Help Create a Recovery Culture in Mental Health Systems”). We are presenting it to you as it contains much useful information on what is required to successfully handle involuntary commitment hearings. Download and read the paper here.
While involuntary commitment laws enrich the psychiatric industry, they not only deprive individuals of their freedom of choice, but milk millions of health insurance dollars annually from private, state, national and military health plans. And while psychiatrists and psychiatric hospitals are today being investigated nationally and in state hearings for insurance fraud, mistreatment of patients, sexual violations and other crimes, the crux of their power – involuntary commitment laws -receives no focused attention.
Gottstein’s concept of a culture of recovery means the elimination of both involuntary commitment and the forced use of antipsychotics and other psychiatric drugs, in favor of the least restrictive alternative.
Antipsychotics, of course, are not a path to recovery. Several court rulings acknowledge the side effects and how patients have a right to decide what goes in their bodies. Of course, most all less restrictive alternatives to antipsychotics have been suppressed out of sight, making it appear that antipsychotics are the only answer, especially in a psychiatrist’s professional judgment.
According to Gottstein, the elimination of the forced use of psychiatric drugs is attainable through upholding of Constitutional Rights and extant legal opinions which have been subverted by:
1) Lying psychiatric expert witnesses,
2) Legal systems that accept, without evaluation, the utterances of such experts, and
3) The counter-intention and general failure of public defenders to actually defend the legal rights of the involuntarily committed person.
The paper shows an actual instance where mental health systems have knowingly acted in violation of the law in the guise of doing what is best for the patient (forced drugging)!
Point #3 above is what Gottstein emphasizes as the why of involuntary commitment. He cites one study that showed that the legal representation of people with mental disabilities was so bad that patients had a better chance of being released in a commitment hearing defending themselves pro se (without the aid of an attorney).
One of his projects is to cultivate willing lawyers who will zealously defend such plaintiffs and to have coordinators in every state working with these lawyers to actually handle cases.