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Comment by SuoDuanDao | Hacker News Reader

Something you may not see being inside the industry is that there is a tendency and a fear of mental health professionals being used as a threat to enforce the overton window. "You believe Epstein was murdered? You'll be committed if you say that too publicly".

It would probably be better both for your aims and those of the parent commentator if rather than defend your practices and instances where you do practice involuntary committal, if you specified the wide range of cases where the public believes involuntary committal would happen and it wouldn't actually.

And for all our peace of mind, please do keep an eye on whether that list starts to shrink. Acquaintances who want to change the subject aren't the only ones who want to enforce the overton window.

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That's completely absurd, at least here in the U.S. If a psychiatrist involuntarily admitted someone just because the patient believed in a conspiracy theory they should be rightfully sued by the patient and would certainly win the case. That would be gross malpractice.

Moreover, there is no incentive for psychiatrists to be admitting people inappropriately. Psychiatrists are physicians and want to feel like they're actually doing something useful like everyone else. I have no interest in admitting a patient that doesn't have a treatable illness. There are plenty of patients with real illnesses to treat.

I would also guess the person you originally responded to is European. I'm a Canadian child of German immigrants and the different attitudes towards mental wards on the two continents is striking. That said, the kind of abuses ryacko described are real, even if there are fewer incentives to commit them on this side of the pond.

The concern I find more reasonable, having seen the role it plays in the old world, is that the mental healthcare community over here will seek to expand its opportunities to commit that kind of abuse. And why not? You seem fairly secure in your belief that none of your colleagues would actually abuse that power if you had it.

And then there are moments when the system comes off as insane in itself.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gustl_Mollath

>the court deemed him a danger to the public and declared him insane based on expert diagnoses of paranoid personality disorder. Mollath's forensic incarceration for seven years and the surrounding legal judgments became the basis of a public controversy in Bavaria and the whole of Germany when at least some underlying elements of his supposedly fabricated paranoid story about money-laundering activities at a major bank turned out to be true after all.

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