General Discussion
In reply to the discussion: Just a reminder: Most people with mental illness are NOT violent. [View all]TygrBright
(20,790 posts)Those "categories" you are talking about are merely descriptions of clusters of symptoms, in most cases, and not very accurate or reliable ones, again in most cases.
While our understanding of mental illness has greatly increased over the last few decades, it is still very primitive. Most of the clusters of symptoms we regard as diagnostic of this or that mental disorder can be caused by multiple factors and many unknowns. IOW, it's not like saying "Okay, we took a blood sample and looked at it in the lab and found X disease organism, so you have x disease and we're going to treat that."
It's not at ALL like that. We cannot take samples of the brain tissue of a live person affected by a mental disorder. Even if we could, we wouldn't know where to look-- the brain is a huge and complex system we've only begun to map.
One thing we do know is that environmental and experiential factors are involved in the development of many disorders to the state of expression ("expression" is the point where a mental disorder becomes clearly obvious AS a disorder, if not to the person affected, at least to a diagnostician. That is, the point where the disorder results in sensations and behaviors that clearly damage the well-being of the person affected.) We don't know exactly how such factors interact with endocrinological balances, electromagnetic flows, genetically-determined brain architecture and microstructures, etc.
A few mental disorders have very highly characteristic symptoms that pretty accurately differentiate them from other problems and predict with a reasonable degree of accuracy how the disorder might progress and how the patient might respond to various treatments. A few. A VERY few, actually.
Really, at this point, all we know for sure about mental disorders is how much we have yet to learn about them before we will truly understand them, be able to accurately diagnose them, and effectively treat them.
I am not willing to build public policy about whose rights are abrogated how on that level of knowledge.
What we can (and should) be doing is funding this research, and providing many, many, many options in every community for the treatments we DO have, that do often work for many individuals although we don't always know why. We need careful development of public policy on how to deal with people whose illnesses may pose a danger to themselves and/or others, and options for providing help and care for those individuals in a non-punitive, non-threatening, caring and productive way. And we need to make those options widely available in communities, and provide families with access to legal and medical assistance in understanding the issues and options, and using them appropriately.
But all that stuff costs a lot of money and our Beloved Oligarchs haven't yet figured out how to make obscene profits from it, so it's unlikely to happen.