I agree with Glasser It will allow the state to define acceptable treatment rather than the individual to whom the treatment is being imposed upon.
Now, a person who has a drug addiction (provided they have the means to pay for it) can choose to enter a treatment program or not. They may determine which treatment program and who treats them. These are important "rights" to maintain.
As for people who have schizophrenia -- here is what usually happens to them. They have no choice. They get thrown into state mental hospitals and they get forced by the courts to undergo electroshock therapy.
The numbers of such diagnoses and treatment is sharply rising-by 70% percent from 1999 to 2000. The Village Voice reports:
Electroshock, now known by the more benign terms "Electroconvulsive Therapy" and "ECT," is making a comeback years after being disgraced as a barbaric treatment that causes great pain and turns people into zombies. Only two months ago, the influential Journal of the American Medical Association acknowledged that ECT is medicine's "most controversial treatment" but proclaimed in an editorial that "the results of ECT in treating severe depression are among the most positive treatment effects in all of medicine." JAMA urged doctors "to bring ECT out of the shadows" of stigma and fear.
Anna Szyszko couldn't agree less. To her, electroshock is all about fear. Her older brother, Adam, a 25-year-old former college student who's been diagnosed as schizophrenic, was scooped up by police last fall and involuntarily committed to a mental hospital. After bad reactions to drug therapy, he was subjected to ECT last December at Pilgrim State Hospital on Long Island against the wishes of his family. Anna, an aspiring actress who lives in Queens, says her brother fears being zapped again. The Szyszkos have gone to court to stop the series of shocks scheduled for Adam and to have him released so he can be treated elsewhere.
"Why are the doctors playing God instead of letting the family make the decisions?" she asks.
And why are the numbers rising? Officials aren't sure. But court statistics show that the number of attempts by hospitals to shock unwilling patients is increasing at an even higher rate: 77 percent from 1999 to 2000.
The cases of Adam Szyszko and Paul Henri Thomas, a Haitian immigrant who's also fighting shock treatment at Pilgrim, have provided the therapy's opponents with enough juice to jolt New York legislators into action. The assembly's mental health committee has scheduled a hearing on the impact of ECT for Friday, May 18, in Albany. http://www.villagevoice.com/issues/0120/harkavy.shtml
I know of many other such cases. The patients may be unwilling for very good reason. Making laws that trap people into being the objects of paternalistic professionals or the state mandated "care" is not the way to go IMHO. The approach certainly seems to be aimed at controlling the "social junk" rather than creating community for them.
Marta