9/16/2008

New laws to protect mentally ill

This law is timely given the statistics that 1 in 6 are mentally ill. With so many of them around us, it is important to protect them from harm by people who are responsible for their well being and people who are to protect them. Are there any laws to protect people who are not mentally ill but treated as one? Psychiatric problems sometimes are not clear cut. There have been instances of geniuses being diagnosed as cracks. The line between brilliance and insanity is very thin. There must be laws to protect the innocent from being wrongly diagnosed as mentally sick too.

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

Geniuses with permanent head damage (PhD) diagnosed as cracks? No wonder we have 1 in 6 or 17% mentally ill people. Hmmm, sounds awfully justified that we need a Minister Mental lah!

Anonymous said...

Said by a psychiatrist in recent ST interview "Most psychiatrists are paraniod. Many of us are not". Very interesting..very hard to tell them apart. Who is "most" and "many"? They belong to the same...paranoid.

What if you are not mental and they all say you are. Do you still have first right of objections?

Anonymous said...

when you are a dog and everyone say no you are cat. is everyone correct.?

It is good that mentally ills are protected. It is protected by the right people and they must be watched.

Not every case is the same and cannot treat the same.

Chua Chin Leng aka redbean said...

this is a highly dangerous field of medical science. other than those clear cut cases of mentally ill, many can be defined as mentally ill by their definitions.

and yes, they can insist that a dog is a cat, given the authoritative badge they wear on their chest. the layman cannot dispute when they say so.

the most terrible injustice that can be inflicted on a person is to be pronounced as mentally sick by the mentally sick and be kept by the mentally sick in a mental prison.

how to safeguard against this?

Anonymous said...

Ha, I guess it will eventually boil down to whether a mentally ill person is 'politically active', otherwise they leave you alone, mentally ill or not. Otherwise they will protect him, forever, from political activities. That's going to be the brutal tooth.