Law
While the insanity defense is the subject of controversy as a viable excuse for wrongdoing, Szasz and other critics contend that being committed in a psychiatric hospital can be worse than criminal imprisonment, since it involves the risk of compulsory medication with neuroleptics or the use of electroshock treatment. Moreover, while a criminal imprisonment has a predetermined and known time of duration, patients are typically committed to psychiatric hospitals for indefinite durations, an unjust and arguably outrageous imposition of fundamental uncertainty. It has been argued that such uncertainty risks aggravating mental instability, and that it substantially encourages a lapse into hopelessness and acceptance that precludes recovery.
Read more about this topic: Anti-psychiatry
Famous quotes containing the word law:
“Since you were so thankfully confused
By law with someone else, you cannot be
Semantically the same as that young beauty:
It was of her that these two words were used.”
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“But what is classification but the perceiving that these objects are not chaotic, and are not foreign, but have a law which is also the law of the human mind?”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“The law cannot be enforced when everyone is an offender.”
—Chinese proverb.