Reply #29: There is a difference

between the state supplying the resources for people to make these decisions on their own and forcing these decisions on them. When Dean talks about this issue he necessarily focuses on the worst cases and uses them as a justification for giving the government the power to force medication on them forgetting the implications to the rest of the population. Having the government force people to take medication or having people spiral out of control are not the only options and seeing Dean set the debate up in these terms brings to light his disregard for civil liberties as well as logic.

The "mentally ill" is a subjective category created by human beings. Some are worse off than others, but legal language does not have these nuances and in the end the reading of any law, and hence what the standards of mental illness are, would be in the hands of government officials and judges. I personally wouldn't trust any one "professional" to make these decisions why would you even think about allowing the government to make these decisions. The reason I say the medical profession, and the phychiatric one in particular, are incompetent is that you can go from doctor to doctor (as I and many others have) and get many different diagnoses. Which one is correct?

Clearly there are some standards of mental illness which require supervision, but where is the line drawn? The real problem is not the small amount of people that are not taking their pills, but the vastly larger group of people who couldn't get medication even if they wanted it, or the lack of facilities and resources for treatment. Add to this a general lack of concrete knowledge on mental illnesses and the drugs used to fight them and what you have is a well meaning disaster both for the people categorized as mentally ill (no doubt some incorrectly) and for civil liberties.