Families Have No Right to Information...

I worry that this slide toward negating the rights of people called ‘mentally ill’ to autonomy, liberty and privacy, in the name of protecting them from harm, is merely reinforcing a vulnerability regime, where such people are permanently labelled as ‘at risk’ (see link, below). In such a context, it will always be possible to subsume their rights to the greater necessity of saving lives. That would be akin to locking up all young men, aged 18-24, because as a group they are at far greater risk of suicide, and self-harm than the general population.

When it comes to human behaviour, risk prediction is an illogical science. Its adherents seek to attribute the statistical probability of a characterised group to the specific features of an individual. However, what works well in hard science does not work at all when it comes to the orderly chaos of the human mind. Those idiots who claim that they can discern the difference between a ‘high’ and ‘low’ risk (of suicide) psychiatric patient, best exemplify this nonsense. No matter how much they might adorn their arguments, no such discernible differences exist. The fact is that the predictive capacity of behavioural risk assessments when applied to any individual is zero.

And so, using the (thankfully) uncommon event of suicide as the rationale for trampling all over the rights of people called ‘mentally ill’ is at best specious, and at worst, downright nasty. Only in those circumstances where there is a real and present threat to the safety of any individual can the rights of any citizen to autonomy, privacy, and liberty be temporarily negated. Even then, stringent safeguards must be in place to ensure no abuse of what are extraordinarily invasive powers. That here in New South Wales, Australia, our mental health laws and policies are regressing to a time when people called ‘mentally ill’ had no rights is a seriously disturbing phenomenon…

www.smh.com.au/national/mental-health-act-ensures-families-no-longer-in-dark-20100321-qo6q.html