F. Bloemsma: Suicidality, forced admission and motivation.
Legally working with forced admission and, therefore, with unmotivated patients is bot the top of an iceberg, on which psychiatric helpers are on slippery grounds with regard to human freedom.
The suicidal attempt or threat, because of its regressive, dissocial and provocative aspects, calls for a medical, moral and social reaction which gives psychiatry, beyond the legai possibility of a forced admission, an opportunity to manipulate with a persons' freedom. In this respect, psychiatry has to escape from three dangers:
—the danger to associate too much with the moral judgment of suicidal acts and account for the penal aspects thereof;
—the danger to associate too much with the medical judgment, which deformates every suicidal act into an act of pathology of personality or psychical functioning;
—the danger that we believe that suicidal acts are symptoms of being not motivated for life and help.
Suicidal persons, to be understood as acting communicatively, deserve more than observation and keeping watch over them, contact and acceptation. The therapeutic or 'negociating' process has a better start then.