The BrownWatch has a follow-up story on Janace Johnson, the Virginia citizen who was bruised and battered by sheriff’s deputies when her family called the police in hopes of having her temporarily detained for a mental health evaluation. Ms. Johnson had seen her psychiatrist that very day and her psychiatrist had raised her medication dose rather than talk to her or try to figure out in any way what was upsetting her so much. When she became worse and her family called her psychiatrist, her doctor, he did not offer to talk to her nor to help them, he advised them to call the police on his own patient. Hmm. I understand why the woman is suing the people who beat her up but I’m not sure why she is not also suing her doctor who thought that calling the police was an appropriate “medical” intervention for his own patient. Oh, I know why! Because it would be very hard to prove that telling families to call the cops rather than, you know, actually acting like a doctor and trying to help a person with a psychiatric illness, falls below the standard of care for psychiatry.
BrownWatch reports that most of her suit has been thrown out already.
May 1, 2008 at 1:59 pm
I wonder if MHPs know how often “standard of care” is used ironically to describe their abysmal treatment of their ‘clients.’ Even the word “care” has been hopelessly corrupted by the practices that typify mental health ‘care.’
Because, most of the time, they don’t.
May 3, 2008 at 3:25 pm
“Because it would be very hard to prove that telling families to call the cops rather than, you know, actually acting like a doctor and trying to help a person with a psychiatric illness, falls below the standard of care for psychiatry. ”
No. Actually it wouldn’t. That’s pretty standard these days.
They beat the living daylights out of this woman, and TAC and NAMI would have us all believe that the cops had no choice, because the commitment laws are “sooooo restrictive”. So, they had to beat the woman to a pulp for her own safety as well as theirs…sure.
I hope families take pause here and see what can, and often does happen. We’ve seen numerous cases of families calling cops to “intervene” in an attempt to get their “loved ones” into a psych facility, only to have those “loved ones” beaten or even killed in front of them. Funny how TAC loves to highlight those events as if the problem is not an imposition on civil liberties and police brutality.
Is this what people want for their “mentally ill loved ones”? Because it happens every day, and even when the cops don’t do this, it can happen inside those “safe” hospitals as well.