GA Resolution : Institutional Psychiatry Act

Category: Human Rights
Strength: Significant
Proposed by: Unibotian WA Mission


Description: The General Assembly,

Hereby Demands:

1. All persons with a mental illness — or who are being treated as such persons — have the right to:
• Voluntary residency in a mental health facility in addition to psychiatric treatment, counselling and rehabilitation by mental heath professionals that are held to the same high standards as all other fields of practiced medicine;
• Not be subject to exploitation for economic, sexual or other gains (e.g., human exhibitions, prostitution);
• Not be subject to degrading treatment and physical, mental or any other form of abuse;
• At-least robust allowances for visitation with their offspring — unless said persons' present behavior suggests that their presence is a danger to their children as determined by domestic courts;
• Be employable -- dependent upon their ability to perform said work without their mental illness establishing a new threat to the safety and wellbeing of themselves or others as determined by domestic courts;
• Freedom of communication, which includes freedom to send and receive uncensored private communications with anyone outside or inside in a mental health facility with respect to domestic court restraining orders (i.e., "no contact" provisions), and inalienable access to communicational services (postal and telephone) and newspapers, radio, television and other forms of media;

2. No patient shall be subject to medication or punishment that is not in their best medical interests or lacks a therapeutic or diagnostic purpose (e.g., as a method of punishment, for the convenience of staff, misuses of seclusion or electroconvulsive therapy, lobotomization, embarrassment via group therapy);

3. Robust periods for visitation between friends, family and other persons and the patients of a mental health facility should be available unless (1) the patient requests without coercion that they not receive visits from any given person, (2) restraining orders have been established by domestic courts against visitation between the patient and certain prospective visitors, — upon said situations, mental health facilities should provide the necessary security to fulfill these request/orders;

4. Mental health facilities shall offer a pleasant environment and living conditions for at least its residents in addition to making a wealth of recreational, educational and leisure activities and an efficient complaint system available to residents;

5. No perceived threat to the social, political or cultural values of the majority (e.g., sexual orientation, unconventional gender roles or political ideology), or the suppression of dissent shall ever be the justification for a patient’s admittance to a mental health facility;

6. That nothing of this resolution shall be misconstrued as prohibiting the practice of involuntary admission to a mental health facility;

7. Member-nations (1) shall not relocate patients or mental health facilities elsewhere to circumvent this resolution, (2) shall consider further legislation on the details of admission to mental health facilities, and (3) are urged to consider any grievous deviation from this resolution by any nation as reasonable grounds for diplomatic intervention or condemnation-- not because said nation has simply 'failed to comply' with this resolution, but because of the mass social grievances that result from such deviation.