The is what I believe is the goal of placing restrictions on people based on “mental health”. It’s so open ended and not easily verifiable that it becomes a sliding scale.
I think there's a good conversation to be had as to what in particular makes physical harms so special as compared to others, and how existing law in every country (including the US) can constitutionally include some non-physical harms within its legislation (such as laws against sending threatening letters, or child pornography law, or fraud).
What is the process to dispute it? You can’t just take a blood test to say this isn’t really a problem.
If a schizophrenic parent has in the past harmed someone, should a court ignore this when determining custody. It is unfair. If you err on being too lenient some people will be harmed. If you err on being stringent some people will be harmed.
Complex problem cannot be solved with ideology and maxims. All solutions will fail some people sometimes.
> If a [] parent has in the past harmed someone, should a court ignore this when determining custody.
There you go, no need to place restrictions on people based on mental 'health', just their actual actions.
Such harms can be reliably detected, with stringent enough criteria.
Mental harms, and the very notion of "normality", are much more nebulous.
Mental harms, in many cases, can also be detected by competent professionals; besides that, it is entirely possible for physical harms to heal and for supporting evidence of their infliction be used to convict. Further, many physical harms depend at least partially on the victim's characteristics or situation; a concert pianist is arguably harmed more by someone cutting off his finger than a schoolteacher would be, for instance. Many physical harms that are rightfully legislated against often require the testimony of the victim for the case to succeed. For a wide class of 'mental harms' it is accurate to say that they are indeed physiological responses - from PTSD to lethargy and insomnia. This is in contrast to the caricature that mental harms are necessarily merely 'hurt feelings'.
I also have concerns that the difficulty or the fact of sometimes being nebulous features of mental harms should necessarily rule out such lawmaking. At best, the minimum for proving such harm should at least be set out by the legislators or judiciary, if the standard of evidence is the roadblock to legislation.
It's also worth remembering that we're talking about harms here, not mere hurts. Harms are much harder to fabricate than hurts are.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_abuse_of_psychiatry_...
Accusations of physical harms can also be concocted as bullying tactics too, in which the harm was suffered as a result of either a self-inflicted injury, or inflicted by somebody else. Such cases can be thrown out due to insufficient evidence. I see no reason why the same cannot be said for a subset of mental harms, in which there are equivalent doctors available to use their expertise to judge the harm.
I agree, the sliding scale only strengthens whomever is in power. In Florida, the baker act is used like this.