| Torture |
| If what is endured by the immediate family of a relapsing schizophrenic were perpetrated by the interrogators of a Draconian regime, it would be internationally condemned as torture. |
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While my wife was relapsing during the autumn of the year 2000, my son and I were kept awake at night by constant shouting and railing. Towards the end, this extended to almost 24 hours a day every day. If I dropped into sleep, I was shouted at and shaken until I awoke.
I was also subjected to constant anxiety regarding my potential public liability for the extreme disturbances caused to neighbours by my wife's behaviour. This included possible damage to their property and interference with their abilities to earn their livings. There was also the financial worry of my wife's fanatical use of the telephone incurring a bill which, on our miserly income, I could easily have been unable to pay.
I am sure it is impossible ever to convey the reality of this to anybody who has not experienced it themselves. They could not possibly have any internal mental frame of reference against which to comprehend it. Therefore, to all, it doubtless appears as mere exaggerated melodrama.
Notwithstanding, I am sure any reasonable person would concur that the above must have caused my son and me "great physical or mental suffering or anxiety" - a phrase used by the New Oxford Dictionary of English to define the effect of torture. Hence it is clear that for those two months in autumn 2000 from when I first informed my wife's keyworker that she was relapsing to the day she was taken into hospital under a Section of the Mental Health Act, my son and I were most definitely subjected to torture.
I am given to understand that a doctor can have medication forcibly administered to a patient only if that doctor judges the patient to be 'a danger to himself or others' at the time he examines the patient. So was my wife 'a danger to herself or others' during that two months?
A 'danger' is an actual or potential cause of 'an ill effect'. I am sure any reasonable person would concur that "great physical or mental suffering or anxiety" is 'an ill effect'. Therefore torture is 'a danger' to its subjects. Therefore, throughout that two months, my wife was 'a danger' to my son and me.
My wife's confused mental state, also most definitely appeared to be causing her "great physical or mental suffering or anxiety". My wife was therefore 'a danger' to herself also. Consequently, my wife was 'a danger to herself and others' from a time more than two months before she was 'sectioned'.
Despite my having informed them as best I could, the medical infrastructure, knowing full well that my wife's symptoms could be so easily assuaged by a little readily available medication, left my son and me to suffer two months of torture.
The Universal Declaration of Human Rights as adopted and proclaimed by the United Nations General Assembly in Resolution 217 A (III) of 10 December 1948 contains:
The circumstances my son and I were left to endure for those two months violated this Article of our fundamental human rights to which our country is supposedly a signatory.
I cannot imagine that the medical staff involved failed to alleviate our torture out of malice or negligence. I can only imagine that they were constrained by law, corporate policy or rules of established professional best practice. If so, then the action of that law, policy or rule unquestionably violated Article 5 of our fundamental human rights. I am given to understand that since October 2000, fundamental rights have been part of English law. In this case, the equivalent of Article 5 should have automatically inhibited the action of the offending law, policy or rule.
I cannot blame on any individual medical operative for being bound by whatever agent of constraint they may have been under. For that I blame those who enacted the law, policy, rule or guideline concerned. I do not blame any medical operative for failing to diagnose the effect of my wife's behaviour upon my son and me. I blame those who require them to diagnose a highly sporadic condition using such an obviously flawed methodology.
Though the actions of the medical operatives may have been legal and professionally correct, it was nevertheless in my opinion inhumane of them to leave my wife unmedicated for two months after becoming what my son and I clearly experienced as 'a danger to herself and others'. Allowing torture to take place when it is within your sole power to stop it with trivial effort may not be professionally negligent, but it is certainly humanly so. In those circumstances, whatever the consequences, my conscience would force me to uphold the fundamental rights of the patient and her family, treating the offending laws, policies or rules with the contempt they deserve.