Mental Illness Doesn’t Cancel Your Right to Say No

Source: Reason
by Jeffrey A Singer & Adam Omary

“If a treatment can improve your health, does that give the government the right to force it onto you? Should the state compel people with diabetes to take insulin, patients with hypertension to take their medications, or people with obesity to lose weight? Most Americans would recoil at such proposals. Yet when it comes to people diagnosed with psychiatric disorders, many people seem willing to make an exception. A physician who administers treatment to a competent adult against the patient’s will violates one of medicine’s most fundamental ethical principles: informed consent. Why should that principle carry less weight when the doctor is a psychiatrist? … A psychiatric diagnosis does not extinguish your right to control your body.” (10/14/26)

https://reason.com/2026/10/14/mental-illness-doesnt-cancel-your-right-to-say-no/