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:
“The law is simply expediency wearing a long white dress.”
—Quentin Crisp (b. 1908)
“The end of law is not to abolish or restrain, but to preserve and enlarge freedom. For in all the states of created beings capable of laws, where there is no law, there is no freedom.”
—John Locke (1632–1704)
“There are no fixtures in nature. The universe is fluid and volatile. Permanence is but a word of degrees. Our globe seen by God is a transparent law, not a mass of facts. The law dissolves the fact and holds it fluid.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)