Involuntary treatment is a weapon. Enclosing someone inside a psychiatric hospital and forcing them to undergo treatment without their consent is synonymous with enclosing a prisoner inside a cell. Involuntary treatment is a carrier of pain, more so than a freeing experience, for some people.

We must not forget, however, that abolishing every psychiatric service in the world would cruelly deny those who are testaments of their benefits. Why should someone deny a homeless schizophrenic chemical refuge, provided that it’s something they are willing to try and they themselves think it will help start living a healthier, more sane life?

Moreover, psychiatrists share a common belief that involuntary treatment will help protect their patients from harming themselves and others. But first, the process goes that you’ll be diagnosed with a mental disorder, which justifies the drug treatments. Is it even proper to assume that diagnosing something objectively measurable such as a heart palpitation can be applied to the mind?

Where are the objective tests that can accurately determining what malfunction might be producing those so-called abnormal behaviors without subjective, scientifically unsound testing? A test measuring behavioral traits is not scientifically sound and objective like a blood test or an ultrasound. You cannot claim to know the effect when you do not know the cause. Rather, it’s an attempt to mash a combination of frowned-upon interpersonal, social, ethical, and political behaviors as an actual disease. What’s the result? Pseudo-science.

What’s even more appalling is that psychiatrists can violently enforce their beliefs into the bodies of the unwilling. Sometimes an involuntary patient is held down, while they scream in agony, as a high-dose crude injection is inserted into them, and this is repeated. Is this treatment, or something closer to torture?

From my own experience, I was injected with anti-psychotic medication, numerous times, without my consent. If my psychiatrist insists it was for the best, is it really so if all the other spiritual, physical, mental, emotional signs point to the opposite?

I am now an involuntary treatment abolitionist. Psychiatry must become a tool welded for those who only consent to it, rather than a metaphor for imbalance, and needless harm. It is time that we listen to the victims and survivors of our outdated psychiatric systems, and start implementing fair change. I was dehumanized and traumatized by involuntary treatment. Were you? Join me.