Back to: Guide to Ad Hoc Committee Documents

Article 11 : Freedom from Torture or Cruel, Inhuman or degrading Treatment or Punishment

Plenary Address on Forced Intervention

Intervention for February 3, 2005 at the United Nations Fifth Session of the Ad Hoc Committee on a Comprehensive and Integral Convention on the Protection and Promotion of the Rights and Dignity of Persons with Disabilities.

My name is Myra K from Support Coalition International. We are a sister organization to the World Network of Users and Survivors of Psychiatry. Support Coalition International represents over 100 organizations of users and survivors of psychiatry worldwide. I am also representing the International Disability Caucus on the subject of forced interventions as contained in Articles 11 and 12. I live in the United States -- the country with the most highly developed mental health system in the world and the country with the most highly developed system of “legal safeguards” in the world, including the right to refuse treatment (with exceptions) and the right to treatment in the least restrictive alternative.

I am diagnosed with a major “mental illness” -- with a severe psychotic disorder. I have been tied down in an ambulance and taken to the emergency room of a privately owned general hospital where I was tightly bound in leather restraints for two hours -- a legally safeguarded length of time. There I was injected with a mind altering substance and forcibly hospitalized. In the hospital I was locked in a seclusion room – again for a legally safeguarded length of time -- with no access to a bathroom. I urinated all over myself. (We would not treat a dog in such a manner.) I was then convinced to take anti-psychotic medication – coerced by the further threat of involuntary injections and by the threat of being sent to a State operated psychiatric center for an extended period of time if I did not take the prescribed medication. I need to stress the point that as long as involuntary treatment exists, there is, in fact, no true freedom of choice or freedom of consent in accepting any treatment from the mental health system.

The “treatment” to which I have been subjected and the fear that I will be subjected to it again can be considered nothing less than cruel, inhuman and degrading and is tantamount to torture. I have felt so discouraged that I’d rather be dead than go through the experience of involuntary hospitalization again. No matter how good the legal safeguards are, forced treatment is still torture. No exceptions or legal safeguards can change this reality. We must not use this convention to simply codify existing mental health laws and practices in the various countries. This issue cannot simply be folded into the discussion of a new article on informed consent. I challenge to you use this Convention to actively promote the dignity and protect the human rights of persons who are considered to have psychosocial disabilities. I thank you for your attention.