THE RIGHT TO TREATMENT

By Katie Dolan

This has been revised from an article published In "Trial News"* in May of 1990."The Right to Treatment" has had many presentations in the last thirteen years, but little has changed in the U.S. dysfunctional "Mental Health" system  

*the Newspaper of Washington State Trial Lawyers  

The Jansens are going to stay at the Ronald McDonald House while their daughter's recovering from a bone marrow transplant.  Debbie will be carefully followed for the next seven years because she might need another transplant. George Jansen's insurance is paying for everything.

There's a history of heart disease in John's family, so he's been having check-ups for years, but he's never been one to work out or stay on his diet.  His wife, Anna, says he has a great team of specialists who feel he will be better than new if he follows orders, eats all the things he hates and exercises. John says its going to be worse than jail. 

Teenage Bobby has cancer.  His doctors are great at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center. Isn't that the same thing that Ted Kennedy's boy had when they amputated his leg? Look how great he is today. 

Three families with a member requiring intensive, intrusive radical, perhaps even experimental medical treatment. I doubt if the teenage girl wanted to have a bone marrow transplant. But if her parents had refused consent, they might have been taken to court and threatened with losing parental rights for denying their child her "right to treatment."  

And what about John? He had a known hereditary condition  which doctors monitored for years.  In spite of John's abuse of his body, no one refused him as an uncooperative patient.  Wasn't it lucky his wife didn't have to wait until John was proven dangerous to himself, or others before she could force him to the doctor? 

Sixteen year old Bobby may be the luckiest of all. No one will accuse his family of causing his cancer. No lawyer will intercede and claim that Bobby will not have to take mind-altering medications if he doesn't want to. No court will question his (or his parents) right to mutilate his body by agreeing to an amputation.

Now let's look in on Bill Watson and his parents. In his second year of college, Bill became morose and withdrawn. One day he locked himself in his bedroom, refusing to come out, pacing all night.  The mental health  professionals  denied him any help because they determined he "wasn't a danger to himself or others'.  His desperate parents finally took the door to his room off the hinges and found Bill hiding in the closet.  He stayed in bed for several weeks.  His mother thought he seemed better one day when he asked for her special pot roast.  Later she found the meat wrapped in a handkerchief on a suitcase. That night Bill left home. 

His parents didn't hear of Bill for six months, until a friend saw him living on the streets, dressed in filthy rags.  At a guardianship hearing they arranged, Bill showed up and said he didn't want his parents to be his guardians. He has been in and out of medical facilities for the last 10 years, with  no treatment  other than drugs he sometimes takes to suppress symptoms.

The first time he was hospitalized, Bill's parents weren't notified until the hospital business office called to check on his father's medical insurance. The insurance company had dropped Bill when he quit school and was no longer living at home.  Now an attorney has demanded that Bill, and a class of people like him, not be forced to take any medications or undergo shock treatment or brain surgery if he doesn't want to.  Bill's parents think that might be all right, but they wonder what treatment the attorney will demand for their very ill son. They also wonder what is wrong with Bill.

      These are combined versions of real people in the medical systems in our state and country. The tragedy of the diagnosis of "mental illness" is not the disease or disorder. It is the lack of recognition as a true medical problem, resulting in a denial of scientific medical treatment. There are hundreds of disorders, diseases, and injuries which cause a person's brain to dysfunction. But unless tumors are found, recognizable epileptic seizures are documented, or gross functioning changes occur after infections,  disorders of the brain are generally lumped into stigmatizing sub-categories of  "schizophrenia", "manic depression", " bi-polar", "psychoses,"  or,  (among children), "emotionally disturbed".  The patient is then in the never-never land of "mental health" and rarely gets comprehensive, scientific medical treatment.  A doctor at the largest psychiatric hospital in Seattle, Washington, once told me, "we couldn't possibly afford to give everyone that comes in here a physical examination."  And a woman who was threatening to blow up her parents was listed in that same hospital as a man for two days, until someone saw her in the nude.

Revolutionary new discoveries of biological causes of mental illness have gone almost unnoticed by the mental health medical community.  Few know that fifteen years ago, Dr. Fuller Torrey,  National Institute of Mental Health researcher,  isolated two virus which lodge in neurons of the brain, releasing between 16 and 22 years of age,  causing schizophrenic behavior.  In 2002 there was a news article about his "discovery" as if it was not only new, but extremely controversial.  Little or no applied research involves mentally ill  patients as partners.  And thousands of mental health professionals are forced into process and  paper work.  More than 40% of mental health billions go to procedural actions by mental health professionals (MHPs), judges, lawyers, case workers,  hospital and institution staff dealing with voluntary and involuntary commitments.

As for the legal professions, why has no one sued for a whole c]ass of people who have been denied medical examinations? Where are the malpractice attorneys to represent the man who was turned away from a voluntary commitment, then beheaded the next door neighbors in his family's up-scale neighborhood? Why can't police officers get a lawyer to sue the state when the patient the state neglected blows the head off one cop and wounds two others? (A man turned down for treatment,  shot and killed his 6 month pregnant wife the next day in January. 2003 the month and year of this update.)

There are other things attorneys can do to bring meaningful change in the way we deal with our fellow Americans diagnosed "mentally ill".

1.    Advise parents or loved ones who notice a severe change in behavior, to call a lawyer before the first medical contact. Hopefully, they will be able to find a lawyer who won't feel that the ill loved one just wants to live an "alterative lifestyle."

2.   Organize police officers to demand that the state treat mentally ill, indigent people in protected environments or the police officers will go on strike until they do!

3.   Arrange for a client who has been denied voluntary commitment, to go to the nearest Canadian Embassy requesting asylum and medical treatment.                                   

 4. Bring suits against doctors who diagnose a child mentally ill or emotionally disturbed rather than finding out what's wrong with the child.

5. Notify states with constitutional treatment mandates that legal associations will hold Individual Treatment Plans as conditional legal contracts, monitored by the legal profession assuring the state honors its constitutional statutory care commitments. 

6. Set up a medical-legal commission which would oversee a resource and research center with computerized world-wide information of  successful treatments for mental illnesses.

7. Present an award to a law school that develops the most innovative, legally sound plan for protecting civil and human rights of patients diagnosed mentally ill, while at the same time protecting their right to scientific medical treatment.

8.   Release public quarterly monthly statistics of newly diagnosed cases of mental illness according to legislative districts.

9.   Collect for the defense of clients with mental illness, detailed history of  their families' early attempts to secure medical treatment and the denials of same by the dysfunctional mental health systems.

10.         Demand the state mental health system be put on trial  whenever a patient's neglected brain disorder is involved in criminal action, along with the unaccountable psychiatrist.

Dr. Oliver Sachs, best selling author of  The Man Who Mistook His Wife for His Hat, headlined his lecture on mental illness with "Let us not ask what disease the patient has, but rather what disease has the patient".   Only when we realize the patient is not his disease will we free the person from his  or her treatment-resistant disorder. 

Maybe, just maybe, there is a question we should ask of attorneys, doctors, politicians, and all Americans.  Do you believe in "the right to treatment" of people with mental illnesses?  Or must we first "kill" the euphemistic mental-health system.