Who is an involuntary commitment?

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The story

“I am a neurologist. My brother has a schizophrenia. I more easily support an involuntary commitment ”, by Shaheen E. Lakhan

The answer

Although I do not share the optimism that the author does with regard to the current administration providing the necessary resources and infrastructure to properly take care of people with a serious mental illness, I am very likely that involuntary commitment should be easier to provide. My schizophrenic adult son lost his life because of this disease. He never accepted or had no overview of his diagnosis and systematically refused any treatment for this. Faced with a diagnosis of cancer in his forties, his paranoia on the medical profession prevented him from asking for treatment that could have saved her life. Since he had lived in another state, we have had no recourse to continue the supervision or any forced treatment for our son. We will pass the rest of our lives by wishing that there was a better system.

– Margaret H.

The answer

You write: “I am optimistic that the Trump administration will follow the resources, infrastructures and policies necessary for it to work because the safer and healthier communities depend on it.” It is a fantasy because it does not care about safer and healthier communities or people in need. He just wants to undertake these people, so others are not embarrassed. I cannot imagine anything that he did that makes you believe that he would make what you recommend.

– John Pippin, doctor and non -profit worker

The answer

I was disturbed by the test of Shaheen Lakhan supporting involuntary commitment for people with a serious mental illness. As a person with mental illness that has known and observed coercive psychiatric systems, I must answer.

Lakhan maintains that people and his brother are “trapped” by brain disease and should be treated with force, even against their will. But what he describes is not compassion is control. Fram psychiatric locking as equivalent to someone’s treatment for a stroke obscures a long brutal story to pathologize people ‘pain and remove their autonomy in the name of treatment. He also ignores that people with mental illness, especially the poor people, poor and racialized, are regularly criminalized, abused and silenced in institutional contexts.

However, I understand Lakhan’s desire to help. Several years ago, a loved one expressed the desire to end their lives, and I did not know what to do. So I brought them to obtain an assessment in a psychiatric hospital – outpatient, I thought. But they were quickly institutionalized, even without insurance to cover their very expensive stay. When they came out, they described me the horrible treatment they received. The staff told them to pray to their mental illness. This has taken more days than he should have to receive essential psychiatric drugs. The group’s “therapy” sessions were poorly executed and deeply stigmatize. The only really offered thing was a loss of autonomy, no real care, but of control. It is not a treatment. It is survival under constraint. Worse, racism and homophobia were crawling. My friend was strange and did not feel safe in this space.

I still don’t know what I would do in this situation again; I was afraid. But I know I wouldn’t force them in a place like that. I understand the sorrow to watch someone you love in a spiral. But compassion cannot mean locking people because we find their suffering uncomfortable. We must fight for care that heals without cages and support that does not require renouncing his rights. Mental disease is not a crime. And forced treatment is not concerned.

– Jacob Shomali

the answer

I have been the disabled psychiatric people for over 40 years. I sympathize with Dr. Lakhan, but he naturally sees only by the objective of his brother’s suffering. He never had to live himself in a psychiatric establishment – has never been in constraints, or has not been authorized to go out, or was maintained by force to be injected. I have never met a client who wanted to be homeless, but I have rarely encountered customers who preferred hospitalization to homelessness – it is how bad the hospitals are. In addition, according to my long experience, drugs work with some people, but a considerable segment of people is made to take fatal medication that does not really help their conditions. My clients get diabetes and take huge weights of weight on ZyPrexa. For the people it helps, it is worth it. But the drugs are given / forced on everyone, a single size corresponds to everyone, whether they help or not. The first housing initiatives under President Biden worked. To lock everyone far from the rest of us will not.

– Susan Stefan

The story

“Learn to say no in a medical system that always asks doctors for more, more, more”, by Cara Poland

The answer

It was a beautiful article. I see doctors talking about balance, handicaps, care and personal care very rarely, and the best doctors who experience medication long before their time. I lived with chronic pain through most of my medical training, and I thought it was the rite of passage. It took me years to realize that it was the system that was defective. This creates doctors who doubt, reject and, worse still, waste their patients when they are the most vulnerable. We are fully losing many doctors with disabilities and long covids, because the creation of significant limits and accessibility does not exist in the American health care system. We dive more deeply into a shortage of health care providers, and the political response to bring more doctors seems to be to make the Faculty of Medicine more accessible. The biggest question is, how do we maintain them there?

– Shi Sherif

the story

“We are mothers of duchenne patients. Recent setbacks with Sarepta should not stop progress, ”by Jennifer Handt and Kelly Maynard

The answer

The authors and mothers Jennifer Handt and Kelly Maynard emit a passionate and emotional advocacy at the FDA so as not to “suppress the risk of the equation entirely”; “Support and multiply progress”; And not to be on a “search for absolute security guarantees”, largely with regard to the elements.

No one asks the FDA to “completely delete the risks of the equation” or to embark on a “search for absolute security guarantees”. On the contrary, people affected by progressive and incurable devastating diseases only require that the FDA fulfills its mission declared by “protecting and promoting public health by ensuring the safety and efficiency of human drugs [has been abbreviated]”, Which unfortunately does not seem to have taken place in the case of their approval from Elenidys. Elecidys’ approval was not recommended by the FDA examination committee, as they did not find substantial evidence of efficiency for waveletes, even when using the micro-dystrophin assessment under the accelerated approval route, which is without any doubt for traditional exposure and a “flexible” standard for a substantial study for substantial evidence. Deaths have taken place in non -ambulatory patients with Duchenne muscular dystrophy, a population for which the FDA clinical journal team has not found an effectiveness for elevations.

Tragically, it seems that these patients have assumed all the risk without proof that the criterion for evaluating the substitution used in Elevedys trials would be “reasonably likely to predict the planned clinical benefit of a drug”. A third death occurred in a clinical trial using the same Sarepta platform technology that the FDA quickly withdrew its approval on July 18, 2025. The authors deplore the FDA demand that Sarepta “stops Elédys shipping due to recent deaths”, describing this as “another mourning”.

Those of the MS community, which my organization represents, are also well accessible many types of sorrow, because we mourn the countless “things” that MS, also a progressive and incurable disease, has taken us. However, I do not think that the MEV community benefits from approval as elements. People with MS and those who love them have more than enough sorrow of what this monster of a disease has taken us. We do not need a “therapy” which will give us even more reasons to cry like elements.

– Kaylin Bower, founder and executive director of on mission for multiple sclerosis

The answer

Congratulations to the two women who wrote this article. I am old enough to remember the Polio epidemic of 1953 and the horrors she tried on my family and friends. I escaped myself, fortunately. The fact is that someone had to take the first polio stroke (yes, shooting, not Sugar Cube), without knowing with certainty. Where would we be without this will with regard to polio?

The first organ transplants were an adventure in the unknown, with many failures and deaths. Think of Christiaan Barnard in 1967 with the first cardiac transplantation, not so long ago, and now the incredible successes of organ transplantation, almost incredible. Think of Leonard Bailey in 1984 and 1985 with the first human cardiac transplants.

Mothers who wrote this article are incredibly courageous insofar as they were ready to try to give their child a chance not to meet like the previous children, knowing very well that the treatment can fail. We must not leave bureaucracy, politics, money, failure, errors and even jealousy stifling those who plunge in the impossible appearance. We would never have reached the moon and the space station if we had done it. May God bless these patients and their families, as well as the researchers and the doctors who take care of them.

– Warren Ellison, MD, retired

The story

“My mother refused the treatment of her breast cancer. His doctors should have respected his choice ”, by Joy Lisi Rankin

the answer

I have been in medical school for 50 years now. As a community and community doctor and geriatrician family, I have often seen the denigration by the majority of my patients of patients and their families whose choices have been criticized and ignored, with unnecessary suffering. Whenever I could, I entered this breach on the side of those whose irreducible suffering had to do so. Some of the most humiliating and significant work in my profession. PRIME NO NOCERE?

– Barry Farkas