Involuntary Commitment

Your article (July 25), “Easier Steps Urged to Hold the Homeless Mentally Ill,” states that “The American Psychiatric Assn. is urging states to make it easier for authorities to involuntarily commit for treatment mentally ill people living in the streets.”

Though professing to be for the good of the mentally ill, and for society, such laws will accomplish only two things: First, the mentally ill will be deprived of their constitutional rights. Second, the psychiatric community will make a great deal of money.

It is quite obvious to anyone who has checked into the statistics of psychiatry that they do not have a great track record of helping those whom they treat. All one has to do is look at the homeless sleeping in our streets who have recently been released from mental institutions to realize that they did not get any meaningful gain from their stays in those hospitals.

Depriving people of their constitutional rights in the name of mental health is something that should frighten the hell out of us as Americans. This is just what Hitler did in Germany as an excuse to eliminate Jews, Gypsies, homosexuals, and any other “unwanteds” that his Nazi psychiatrists determined were not part of their “eugenic” ideal.

The laws in the states of Washington, Alaska and Texas, which allow the involuntary commitment of people who “may have trouble attending to the basic necessities of food, clothing and shelter in the future,” can be interpreted to include anyone, anywhere, that any psychiatrist decides to incarcerate in a mental hospital. This gives them free reign to drug, electric shock and lobotomize any person who does not happen to have a battery of friends and/or lawyers to help regain his freedom.

Next year is the bicentennial of the signing of our Constitution. Let’s not celebrate this glorious document by lobotomizing it.

JEFFREY SCOTT

Hollywood