naath | (no subject)

A general trend in nuisances...

Whilst it is very nice to be helpful, to offer practical assistance or information or opinion that might assist me in making decisions (there are many ways to be helpful) it is often the case that the help offered may not actually be helpful, for a variety of reasons. Naturally this help has been offered out of kindness and generosity and should be politely refused, not rudely rejected. This is not the nuisance.

The nuisance is when the help-offerer goes on to insist that you accept their help, follow their advice, etc. even after I have politely declined and offered an explanation.

This is a nuisance (and worse than a nuisance) at a wide range of levels - from the small-time barely-a-flicker-of-irritation right up to serious assaults. Naturally the more serious the violation the more annoyed I am about it; but I am also generally-annoyed about the prevelance of this idea that my help/advice/etc is SO WONDERFUL AND AMAZING that OBVIOUSLY you want to follow it.

At the most trivial end - my bike lights have no battery, they do not need to be turned off, I deliberately leave them on at all times because I'm a lazy wottsit. So, naturally my life includes a large number of people telling me I have done so; or even turning them off while I'm not there. I strive to remember that these people are generous helpful people who I can't reasonably expect to know anything about how my lights work.

At the most serious end - the law in this country provides for detaining and forcibly medicating people if the relevant someone decides that that's a good idea. Now, I am absolutely all for providing absolutely everyone with all the medical treatments that they want; and I am on-balance in favour of detaining people who have committed crimes in part in order to protect others from the possibility that they will commit more crimes; I'm certainly in favor of offering people who have committed crimes the option of receiving medical treatment whilst detained; I'm just not in favour of people being forcibly medicated against their will.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Well, on the one hand, many people might say that having their personality forcibly modified is worse than being imprisoned, like you could stop someone stealing by imprisoning them or amputating their hands, but we generally go for the former.

But on the other hand, I think this is a very difficult question for lots of reasons. At one end of the spectrum, suppose that someone comes to you with their doctor and says "so long as I have this medicine I'm exactly who I want to be, exactly myself, but if I forget to take it I lose all my personality and go into an irresistible homicidal rage, if you see me like that, please, please force me to take the medicine even if I don't want to". I think most people would agree that was better than the alternative.

On the other hand, there's a long and sordid history of mental and physical illnesses, unusual life choices, uncooperative people, etc, etc being treated with drugs that are more about controlling them than actually helping them, and if you're at risk for being drugged into something you consider not-you, I think you're right to be horrified.

I think most people would agree with those two ends of the spectrum in theory. But I think people would disagree how common they are. One person might say "surely if a doctor recommends it and a court orders it, it must be for the best?" Another might say that inappropriate use of medication is so prevalent that even if there are theoretically justified situations they're vanishingly unlikely compared to everything else, so it's simpler to just say "never force-medicate ever, because it's almost certainly a gross and unhelpful invasion of bodily autonomy".

I suspect the truth is somewhere between those extremes, as in, for some people it indisputably helps and later on they would uncoercedly agree, and for other people, it's synonymous with having their autonomy taken away and being locked up in a mental hospital until they can pretend to be "normal", but I don't know how comparatively common they are.

I think at present there is also the unhelpful additional case that for some people the only way they can get access to the medical interventions they want is to be "forced" to take them because some doctors are unhelpfully useless at providing psychiatric care. Obviously I think these cases are bad - someone asking for care should be able to get it!

I don't have any numbers on this sort of thing at present; I expect it's a difficult sort of thing to count at the time.

Good point. Aaaugh, that's the worst of both worlds :(