Patient advocates filed a lawsuit accusing New Jersey psychiatric hospitals of giving patients virtually no chance to object to being involuntarily medicated with powerful drugs with potentially severe side effects, the Star-Ledger reports.
"It's abysmal," Emmett Dwyer, litigation director for Disability Rights New Jersey, the federally funded advocacy organization behind the lawsuit, told the Star-Ledger. "New Jersey is running the worst mental health system I have ever encountered."
The state's policies--which do not allow patients to appeal decisions on involuntary medication to an outside authority-- violate patients' rights for a judicial process to review requests for involuntary medication, according to Disability Rights New Jersey, which filed the lawsuit in federal court in Trenton on Tuesday.
Most states require a judge's ruling for involuntary medication, according to the suit, including New York, Connecticut and other large states, like California, Florida and Texas, the New York Times reports.
New Jersey rules allow a patient in a state hospital to appeal medication decisions only to people in the hospital, the Times reports. But the internal appeal process is routinely ignored and psychiatric patients in private hospitals lack any opportunity to appeal medication regimens at all, the lawsuit says.
The drugs forced on patients include powerful medications for conditions like schizophrenia and bipolar disorder that may help people with those diseases, but may have serious side effects, including diabetes, tremors, seizures, high blood pressure, obesity, sedation, aches and impaired mental function, the Times reports.
"As a patient in a state hospital, it's your legal right to refuse and go through a process, but you get severely penalized if you try," Dwyer told the Times. "They view you as noncompliant with treatment. They give you an injection instead of a pill. And they tell you if you don't take it, you won't get out."
To learn more:
- Here's the involuntary medication complaint filed by Disability Rights New Jersey
- read the Star-Ledger account
- see the New York Times article