IT’S COMPLICATED –
Sept. 12, 2022 – Yet, the insanity defense has been used in numerous trials involving school or community shootings. Found incompetent to stand trial or guilty but “mentally ill,” perpetrators can be sent temporarily or long-term to a psychiatric facility to be forcibly drugged until they are deemed competent to stand trial or can be released. In one such case, the cost to the state was close to $350,000 spent on psychiatric treatment.
CCHR says that psychiatrists ignore the studies linking psychotropic drugs to violence, yet psychiatric hospitalization and prison mental health services rely upon these drugs as “treatment.” Defendants deemed “mentally ill” can now be sent to mental health courts to be tried for misdemeanors, but these courts are conduits to forced treatment that includes hospitalization and “medication.”[5]
Governments have been falsely led to believe that mental health courts will give the accused better access to mental health treatment, that this will help them, and that this could reduce the prison population and crime. In California, Eric Harris, public policy director at Disability Rights California stated: “In no way should there be a forced situation where you’re shoving needles into people or forcing them to take medication, that’s where you get into people who resent it and regret it and they go down a spiral of self-medication or any other number of issues.”
