Involuntary treatment
[11] Involuntary euthanasia was carried out in Nazi Germany for those who had certain psychiatric disorders or learning disabilities as part of the Aktion T4 program.
[13]: 192 Throughout the latter half of the 20th century, homosexual men in the UK were given the choice between chemical castration with female sex hormones or prison including, notably, Alan Turing.
[16]: 7 This practice continued in Sweden until 2012[17] and Denmark until 2014[18] Japan currently requires transgender people to be sterilized and have their ovaries removed to be recognised as a different gender.
[21]: 116 Thomas Percival was a British physician who published a book called Medical Ethics in 1803, which makes no mention of soliciting for the consent of patients or respecting their decisions.
Earlier legal cases had created the underpinnings for informed consent, but his judgment gave a detailed and thought-through discourse on the matter.
[21]: 56 In response to the bubonic plague, some city states restricted movement of people into them using cordon sanitaires, and separated those were suspected of being infected into makeshift camps.
[26]: 237 During the Spanish flu pandemic western cities implemented social distancing and closed schools, churches, theatres and restricted public gatherings.
The use of hospitals instead of jails prevents those detainend from receiving legal aid, makes indefinite incarceration possible, discredits the individuals and their ideas.
[30]: 29 During the Nazi era and the Soviet rule religious and political dissenters were labeled as "mentally ill" and subjected to inhumane "treatments".
[31][32] From the 1960s to 1986, abuse of psychiatry for political and ideological purposes was reported to be systematic in the Soviet Union, and occasional in Eastern European countries such as Romania, Hungary, Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia.
[4] Brazil,[41] Bulgaria,[42] Costa Rica,[43] Croatia,[42] Czechia,[42] France,[42] Hungary,[43] Indonesia,[44] Italy,[42] Poland,[42] and Russia[45] make certain vaccinations mandatory.
[b] Szmukler and Appelbaum constructed a hierarchy of types of coercion in mental health care, ranging from persuasion to interpersonal leverage, inducements, threats and compulsory treatment.
Courts in the United States have consistently upheld the right of competent adults to decline blood transfusion even when it would be life-saving, though there have been exceptions where the death of a patient could leave a child orphaned.
[55]: 255 In the United States, courts have ordered pregnant women to involuntarily undergo caesarean section, intrauterine transfusion, and enforced bed rest.
[58]: 5 In the United States, doctors are responsible for providing a good standard of care for patients who are children which can lead them to make decisions at odds with the parents wishes.
[61]: 2 A 2014 Cochrane systematic review found that compulsory outpatient treatment of those with severe mental health disorders "results in no significant difference in service use, social functioning or quality of life compared with standard voluntary care.
[67]: 129 He argues that this focus on risk causes mental health professionals to make decisions defensively based on reputational damage if there were to be any inquiry and that multidisciplinary approaches are used for this purpose.
[68][citation needed] A number of civil and human rights activists, anti-psychiatry groups, medical and academic organizations, researchers, and members of the psychiatric survivors movement vigorously oppose involuntary treatment on human rights grounds or on grounds of effectiveness and medical appropriateness, particularly with respect to involuntary administration of mind altering substances, ECT, and psychosurgery.
Critics, such as the New York Civil Liberties Union, have denounced the strong racial and socioeconomic biases in forced treatment orders.
[69] Special rapporteurs of the United Nations (Catalina Devandas Aguilar and Dainius Puras[70]) consider it as an infringement of the dignity of those subjected to it, with severe consequences for their physical and mental integrity and call on concerned states to put an end to respect individual's autonomy.
[71][72][73] All states in the U.S. allow for some form of involuntary treatment for mental illness or erratic behavior for short periods of time under emergency conditions, although criteria vary.
Further involuntary treatment outside clear and pressing emergencies where there is asserted to be a threat to public safety usually requires a court order, and all states currently have some process in place to allow this.
Long term "warehousing", through de-institutionalization, declined in the following years, though the number of people receiving involuntary treatment has increased more recently.[when?]
In 1979, the United States Court of Appeals for the First Circuit established in Rogers v. Okin that a competent person committed to a psychiatric hospital has the right to refuse treatment in non-emergency situations.
The case of Rennie v. Klein established that an involuntarily committed individual has a constitutional right to refuse psychotropic medication without a court order.
Sell v. United States imposed stringent limits on the right of a lower court to order the forcible administration of antipsychotic medication to a criminal defendant who had been determined to be incompetent to stand trial for the sole purpose of making them competent and able to be tried.
In Washington v. Harper the Supreme Court upheld the involuntary medication of correctional facility inmates only under certain conditions as determined by established policy and procedures.
