> Jun. 15, 2001. 01:42 AM The Toronto Star
>
> Prodigy wins right to refuse drugs
> Medication could slow mentally ill man's thinking, court says
>
> Tracey Tyler
> LEGAL AFFAIRS REPORTER
>
> A physics prodigy who suffers from manic depression has triumphed over two
> psychiatrists in a long-running court battle over their right to treat him
> with mood-altering drugs.
>
> Professor Scott Starson has the right to refuse the drugs that could slow
> his thinking down to normal levels, the Ontario Court of Appeal ruled
> yesterday.
> Starson understands he is mentally ill and that refusing treatment could end
> up keeping him confined to a psychiatric hospital, the court said.
>
> But he has also concluded that taking the drugs would prevent him from
> engaging in the scientific research that has given his life meaning, a
> development he feels would be ``worse than death,'' the appeal panel said.
>
> ``Professor Starson is an exceptionally intelligent man,'' Justices James
> Carthy, John Laskin and Stephen Goudge said in upholding a judge's decision
> in 1999 to overturn a provincial review board's finding that he was
> incapable of making decisions about treatment.
>
> ``Although he has no formal qualifications in that field, he is in regular
> contact with some of the leading physicists in the world,'' the court said.
>
> Pierre Noyes, director of the Linear Accelerator Centre at Stanford
> University in California, describes Starson's thinking in the field of
> physics as ``10 years ahead of its time.''
>
> Starson, 45, represented himself before the court last year.
>
> His long-time lawyer, Anita Szigeti, said the panel's 3-0 decision yesterday
> is important because it sends a message to psychiatric review boards that
> they can't always take a ``paternalistic'' approach to patient treatment.
>
> But Starson's mother, Jeanne Stevens, was heartsick over the decision.
>
> ``You know what the problem is? They didn't include me,'' she said,
> describing her son as a man of ``great potential'' suffering without
> medication.
>
> ``He thinks he's superman. He thinks he's the most brilliant person in the
> world,'' Stevens said in an interview. ``I adore my son, the man that is my
> son. He is truly such a good-natured, gentle, fascinating, beautiful person,
> but his illness has destroyed me. It's been devastating.''
>
> Starson has been in mental institutions several times in the past 15 years,
> the court said. In 1998 he was found not criminally responsible, due to his
> mental disorder, after he was charged with uttering threats against fellow
> residents of a rooming house.
>
> The Ontario Review Board ordered him detained in January, 1999, at the
> Centre for Addiction and Mental Health in Toronto. Psychiatrists proposed to
> treat him with mood stabilizers, anti-psychotic and anti-anxiety drugs and
> medication to combat Parkinson's disorder, but he refused.
>
> The psychiatrists offered no evidence that any of the drugs previously
> forced on Starson had actually helped him, the appeal court said
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