The Globe and Mail cites perennial involuntary committal promoter and Schizophrenia Society rep John Gray as saying that 60,000 people are involuntarily treated in Canada each year. It’s a stunning statistic. And you can bet it’s actually much higher if we add in all the “treatment by forcible coercion” numbers, because it’s common practice for psychiatrists to say to patients in hospitals, “Stay here and accept treatment, or we’ll simply commit you involuntarily and force treatment on you.”

Ironically, and unfortunately typically, the longer email-web discussion with Gray begins with a completely false statment: “…civil rights have swung to a point where involuntary hospitalization and treatment are next to impossible.  Only those who pose an imminent danger to others can be held and treated…” In fact, the opposite is true, which Gray himself points out later — people can now be treated involuntarily in most of Canada simply for having the potential to experience “physical or mental deterioration”.

Gray goes on to point out what he thinks is an irony: “The irony is that treatment with medication, compulsory if necessary, is the only known scientific means of treating people sick enough to have been involuntarily admitted.”

What’s REALLY ironic, Mr. Gray, is that a recent survey of the scientific literature about forced treatment published in the Journal of Advanced Nursing found, “There is a dearth of literature in the area of coercion in administration of medication and much more research is needed examining all aspects of this contentious practice.” The BBC also covered the story this week, quoting the lead researcher from the Institute of Psychiatry saying that they found only 14 studies had ever been done worldwide on forced treatment, and none of them had even looked at the possibility of alternatives: “We feel that this is unacceptable and more needs to be done to establish sound clinical evidence and viable alternatives to this contentious approach.”