Good Luck In Jail

The fine folks at the Treatment Advocacy Center had a recent post with which I actually agree. Namely, that inmates in Florida with mental illness must be treated, as a court recently ordered the state. I think TAC is on shakier ground when it asserts that antipsychotics are not mind-controlling. Perhaps "controlling" is too strong a word--something like mind-leveling might capture it better--but there's no denying that the drugs do alter peoples' minds and behaviors, and, where they work, they do so in a predictable fashion. Sounds like control to me. But, then, control is a big buzz word among anti-psychiatry folks, so I understand why they jump on the word.

Taking the situation in prisons and jails together with antipsychotics, I think an interesting ethical and legal quandary arises when you consider how antipsychotics are used on inmates. What if Zyprexa--or Haldol for that matter--is messing up an inmate's cognition or making them put on 30 pounds and raising all manner of metabolic issues? How does the inmate get a prison doctor to listen to their concerns? Does the state have the right to force to make someone take a med that is screwing them up in order to maintain the inmate's mental status? Can you inflict injury--diabetes, say--upon someone in order to restore their competency for trial? Can you medicate a prisoner into sanity so that you can legally execute them for a crime? (OK, we know the answer to that one.)

I ask the above in a speculative fashion.