Ok, I’m spending one more post (for now) driving a stiletto into this one-sided, hopelessly biased WHO document. World Health Organization & Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights . 2023. Mental Health, Human Rights and Legislation: Guidance and Practice. World Health Organization.
Stay with me. There’s one more reason in this strand. I highlight this one to demonstrate the, um, ‘level of honesty’, let’s call it, of the writers. Here goes,
‘Many experts have noted that compulsory treatment powers are ineffective in their own terms’ (84). This reference is a Cambridge University Press book. Page references are provided, so I could waste more time chasing down this rabbit hole, but at this point I give up. I would bet my mortgage that the reference is as dishonest as all the previous ones.
This is what old gits like me call a kitchen sink argument with your wife. Husbands, you’ll know what I mean. It’s when she throws everything, including the kitchen sink, at you. You get accused of something. You give reasonable explanations and try to keep calm. That doesn’t resolve it. You get accused of more and more, nothing to do with the original accusation. Women, be honest, you know you can be like this. You do it because you just have to win, by any means necessary. What’s the ratio of male to female writers of this UN crock of shigpit, just wondering?
That’s what’s going on above. These academics and activists masquerading as researchers a) have no intention of being honest, of evidencing their hypothesis – if you want to call it that – or of showcasing both sides of the issue because b) they only want to win. They are true believers in the righteousness of eradicating restraint and seclusion, and their opponents are evil, wicked, Nazis who don’t even deserve to be engaged with and should be cancelled.
To them, the ends justify the means, just like Satre’s Hoederer who doesn’t mind that ‘I have plunged my arms up to the elbows in shit and blood’ and mocks Hugo’s refusal to dirty his hands as the luxury of ‘purity’.
These bullshit words, ‘Ineffective even in their own terms’ can mean anything and nothing. (Unless you went on to specify what you meant by them.)
Would anyone honest argue ‘sectioning patients is ineffective because not all of them get better.’ Or ‘…because some of them still kill themselves when they are discharged.’
That is like arguing laws against rape, murder and burglary are pointless since all those crimes are committed despite the law prohibiting it. Obviously that proves the law is pointless and should be cancelled.
A side point. You cannot write a multi-author document like this and make it consistent in tone, language, phrasing etc without an editor taking it over and, er, editing it so it is uniform. Who selected that editor? Using what criteria? A high scoring useful idiot, maybe?
Moving on, pay close attention to this, ‘Article 2, paragraph 1, obliges each State party to take actions that will reinforce the prohibition against torture through legislative, administrative, judicial, or other actions that must, in the end, be effective in preventing it.’
And here ‘Since the adoption of the Convention against Torture, the absolute and non-derogable character of this prohibition has become accepted as a matter of customary international law.’
I think we’re getting to the juicy bit. From my reading, the UN Convention ‘obliges’ Britain to legally, judicially etc ‘reinforce the provision’, you know the one against torture. And as I’ve shown, these lazy clowns, hiding safely behind their desks in their expensive luxury offices in Manhattan and Geneva have heroically re-categorised secluding a patient who wants to kill, rape, punch you unconscious, bite your nose off (*) etc, as torture. Don’t you feel safer already? Probably not.
*) all true but in the spirit of honesty, most restraints and seclusions are not as bad as that.
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