Of course, I do think there should be some effort to be made to stabilize individuals in crisis. Just like a typical hospital.

Especially those who may be having medication side-effects, which with psychiatric medication, incidence rates for some fairly severe side effects (such as the potentially irreversible condition called tardive dyskinesia) are fairly high across most commonly encountered drugs.

Add polypharmacy (5 or more drugs at the same time, which is common in illnesses such as schizophrenia, such as antipsychotic polypharmacy being used in 30% of such patients) and a mental hospital is probably the only place that is equipped to help somebody in such a situation. It's irresponsible, dangerous, and unethical what is happening in the current standard of care in my opinion.

I believe consent is the most important thing you need in medical care. Just as you should be able to refuse life-saving care for whatever reason you might have in a regular hospital, you should be able to reject (for example) a long-lasting intramuscular antipsychotic injection, which are usually part of commonly encountered treatment orders.

It's rape if you don't give somebody a choice, and think about what that does to somebody. I am an actual victim of rape, and I can tell you it's no different if a doctor or nurse does it to you. It's something you didn't want, and that should be good enough reason for a doctor to not administer such care. If you have other reasons, such as not liking how it makes you feel, etc. that's more than enough.

And you should be able to make decisions that affect your body especially if you're not a threat to yourself or others. If somebody needs to taper off to safely get off their medication, then have them taper off to get off the medication - but still overwhelm them with support in other ways they approve of if you determine they need it.

BUT there's a pretty valid alternative to scary things like involuntary treatment orders, restraints, locked doors, "Mental Health Courts", and disease-first care.

And that's Soteria Houses. You can read my thoughts on this (in my opinion) revolutionary and successful standard of care in my previous posts: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37140331

The gist is: no locked doors, welcoming supportive environment, no dehumanization or medicalization of their psycho-social issues, minimal psychiatric intervention (mostly for stabilization from what I've read), and they have pretty impressive results treating a supposedly lifelong and chronic disease.

However, it or something like it will never manifest into becoming the dominating model unless we slash the greed out of mental health care and health care at large.

I firmly believe that the medications commonly used in this field today and especially in the past are prescribed irresponsibly, without the long-term testing they need, and side effect/interaction profiles are not studied in the detail they need to be before these drugs are unleashed. This creates a revolving door for these companies to cash out on these people, either through their hospitals or the doctors they brainwash. And boy, do they. You know it's bad when you see an advertisement for XYZ psychiatric drug on the television. It's been bad for however as long as the field has existed. A true horror that we will look back on with great pain as a world.

The fact is that most people probably never have heard about Soteria Houses, and that's by design. It breaks their big illusion. Schizophrenia and other serious mental illness need to be a boogeyman that only a psychiatrist can understand. They say it's a lifelong disease that only they can manage the symptoms of. And this is because they more often than not create the disease in these very, very vulnerable people with the chemicals they claim help more than they hurt.

I disagree that this is the best we can do, especially when it comes to the care of schizophrenia and other mood disorders. We can do better, we are way too primitive to be messing with an organ in ways we don't fully understand with definite greater health implications, especially so in people that may not be able to fully comprehend and communicate what is happening to their bodies.