Word: illing
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...mayor of my hometown, Albuquerque, has proposed to follow in New York State’s footsteps and legalize the forced medication of the “mentally ill.” Given the sordid history of government involvement with “mental illness,” Mayor Martin J. Chávez is leading Albuquerque—and the rest of the country in his wake—down a very slippery slope...
...wants to give the state the power to coerce the most vulnerable members of society into taking medicine, supposedly for their own good. Under a New York-style “Kendra’s Law,” the courts can define who is “mentally ill,” and—even before an individual has done anything wrong—force them to undergo treatment and take psychiatric medicine...
...course, “mental illness” is a notoriously ill-defined ailment and subject to great manipulation by the psychiatric establishment and the state. Thomas S. Szasz, professor emeritus of psychiatry at the State University of New York in Syracuse, Michel Foucault, historian and philosopher, and others have shown that governments have frequently applied labels of “madness,” “insanity,” and “mental illness” to political and social dissidents...
...Foucault argues, governments initially began the practice of managing “lunacy” toward the end of the Middle Ages, creating asylums for those whose behavior was deemed abnormal. With little scientific understanding of mental illness, “lunatic” was a broadly defined label that too frequently included the deaf, the mute, and the intellectually slow. “Treatment” meant squalid living conditions and physical abuse. Beginning in the 18th century, some steps were taken to make treatment of the mentally ill more “humane,” but well...
...some states are trying to bring the mentally ill back under state control. Kendra’s Laws, which force non-hospitalized individuals to take medication to control some condition defined by the government as mental illness, are just one more chapter in this long history of state-controlled psychiatry...