Cork man set to challenge law

Mental health: A Cork man plans to mount a legal campaign to have forced incarceration, forced medication and forced ECT in the treatment of mentally ill patients made illegal in Ireland.

As part of PRO Cork Advocacy Network, John McCarthy has been campaigning for a change in the law regarding the treatment of those with mental health problems, and a change in society which would give people their dignity. He now plans to put all his resources into a personal campaign to have the mental health law changed in this country.

Mr McCarthy highlighted the urgent need for reform of mental health legislation in Ireland at a seminar at the Irish Centre for Human Rights at NUI Galway at the weekend where he spoke on mental health, human rights and the law.

Mr McCarthy has drawn on his own experience of mental illness which led to suicidal tendencies, extreme loneliness and isolation over a three-year period that saw him admitted to several mental health institutions. Although his illness almost cost him his home, his livelihood and even his own life, Mr McCarthy has recovered to become an ardent campaigner for the rights of the mentally ill.

He was the subject of the recent RTÉ Would You Believe documentary, entitled Diary of a Madman, which chronicled his personal experience of severe mental illness.

"People in this country can be forced by the medical profession to be strapped down on a table, to have a rubber dog bone put into their mouth and two electrodes attached to their frontal lobes and to receive 100 volts of electricity to their brain. It cannot be morally right under human rights legislation for this to happen," said Mr McCarthy.

He said he only survived his own experience because of the strength and support he received from his wife and two sons who never took away his dignity.

"If we can get the law to stop forced medication, ECT and incarceration, all the resources currently being pumped into upholding that system, which is an abysmal failure, can be funnelled into finding the alternatives that we should have in the first place," he said.