I was looking for something else by googling my own name and this was one of the first things that came up here:
I’ve bolded my favourite parts:
Anita Szigeti’s name strikes fear in the hearts of people who commit people for a living. The Toronto lawyer and staunch civil liberties advocate agrees insufficient beds and other treatment resources are at issue but her solution is less compulsion, not more. Her job is to fight for her clients’ rights and autonomy against those who would hospitalize or treat them against their will for their own good. She challenges committals at Ontario’s Consent and Capacity Board, seeking to emphasize her clients’ civil liberties ahead of the state’s responsibility to help people who can’t help themselves. She’s notorious enough among Toronto-area shrinks that when my psychiatrist saw her name on a book I was reading (A Guide to Consent and Capacity Law in Ontario is no beach read, but is very thorough), his eyebrows rose. She is busy. But she is not popular. Where psychiatrists see a necessary, underutilized way to improve the lives and prognoses of people who don’t know their lives need improvement, Anita Szigeti sees a setup stacked against the most vulnerable patients who, no matter how severe their illness, still have rights that are all too easily ignored. She contends in our chat that most of her clients shouldn’t be committed to begin with. Many are held for reasons outside their control and outside the elements of their illness—they don’t have housing to go home to, for example, or can’t access intensive out patient treatment that could keep them out of hospital. And anything more than a few days’ institutionalization can make you lose the supports you had when you were out, making it even riskier to discharge you: You can lose social assistance, lose your apartment, lose your job, lose touch with whatever social connections you had on the outside. “I don’t blame the doctors; they’re clinical caregivers. They want their patient-client to get better. They think they can help them.” 17
268 Anna Mehler Paperny
anitaszigeti 