Involuntary hospitalization

The chapter outlines a series of arguments designed to answer possibly the most important ethical question in psychiatry: under what circumstances, if any, is it ethically justifiable to treat people with clinical features of mental illness, despite their objection? We argue that involuntary inpatient treatment is ethically justified, but only in circumstances where: the objection to treatment was made without decision-making capacity; there is no reason to believe that the person would have objected had he or she been competent; the treatment will protect the person from serious harms (when balancing these with any harms associated with the treatment); and involuntary treatment represents the avenue for protection least restrictive of the person’s freedom. Having established a model for ethically justified involuntary inpatient psychiatric treatment, we examine how it can be applied to two real-world cases.