Human Rights And Mental Health Essay

Are human rights infringed in treatments for mental health?

In 1948 the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was produced by the United Nations. It was created to ensure that every human being is treated fairly and equally. Unfortunately for mental health patients this is not always the case. In many communities, mental illness is not considered a real medical condition, but viewed as a weakness of character. Even when people with mental disorders are recognised as having a medical condition, the treatment they receive is often less than humane. When looking at the treatment of mental health patients in comparison to patients with the capacity to make medical decisions for themselves, human rights are not always taken in to account, but is this ethically correct?
Ethics, the study of morality, of what is right and what is wrong, is a means of deciding a course of action. Many philosophers have their own theories about how to decide what is ethical. Philosopher David Hume divided the term ‘ethics’ in to three areas; Meta-ethics, Normative ethics and Applied ethics. Meta-ethics looks at the meaning of language used in ethics and asks questions about truth. Normative ethics look for practical moral standards that we can all live our lives by and Applied ethics are the application of theories about whether something is right and wrong. Kantian Ethics was founded by Immanuel Kant. He believed that we would know what was right or wrong based on reason, individual autonomy and duty. That all that we learn is based on stimulus we get from our senses, which our minds then process into an understanding of what we sense and then our intellect explains it to us as reason. “All our knowledge begins with the senses, proceeds then to the understanding and ends with reason. Nothing is higher than reason” (I. Kant, 1781).   This theory differs from that of Utilitarianism, where it is believed that a decision is moral if it leads to happiness for the majority. Jeremy Bentham...