I don't believe a jail can force medication in the face of refusal either. Absent an order from a judge we can't force any adult patient to take medication without their consent. Perhaps there were orders on Casey and we just haven't heard about them yet. If Casey was on Invega Trinza and only needed an injection every 3 months as opposed to daily meds that are being assumed here, he may have been perfectly medicated for the entire duration of the escape. We just don't know.
When/if the Connie Ridgeway trial takes place I expect to see the complete details of CW's treatment history and medications given he is using an insanity defense. All we can really do until then is guess.
Totally agree about the "mind of matter" business. That's like saying a diabetic patient could lower their blood sugar if they just thought about it hard enough. It doesn't work that way. IMO
New study challenges our understanding of schizophrenia as a chronic disease that requires lifelong treatment.
sciencenordic.com
I don’t know if anyone was reliably diagnosed with schizophrenia, or had been prescribed long acting antipsychotic depot injections, or oral antipsychotics.
I totally agree that the majority of people with schizophrenia will relapse very badly if they stop taking the prescribed antipsychotic medication (after a period of time), and that subsequent control of the illness with restarted medication will be much more difficult, over the longer term. That is putting it mildly.
Psychiatrists researching ‘the schizophrenias’, have long thought (for twenty years or so at least) that maybe 20% of patients could stop their medication, but they had no idea of which patients would be in this group. It was not seen as clinically worth the risk of stopping the medication ‘to see how the patients fared’, because the longer term adverse effects on 80% of patients would be so dreadful.
At one time, not so long before this, it was thought a good idea for patients to have ‘drug holidays’ from antipsychotic medication, but this did not work out well.
The article that I have linked from Denmark seems to suggest that a higher percentage of people diagnosed with schizophrenia might, after some time, be able to cope without taking antipsychotic medication. I think that many psychiatrists will view this with extreme caution.
I think that the research shows, as has already been stated, that schizophrenia is a biological illness, and, just as people with Type 1 diabetes need insulin, people diagnosed with schizophrenia need antipsychotic medication.
I am not qualified to explain why some people can stop the antipsychotic medication without having a relapse.
I know that psychiatrists have discussed this phenomenon, stating that we don’t know everything about the brain. Maybe some patients never really had schizophrenia, perhaps their diagnosis was more akin to something like a schizophreniform psychosis. Some opine we should more correctly speak of ‘the schizophrenias’.
I would never advise a person diagnosed with any psychosis to stop their prescribed medication as, (in my opinion), the result is likely not worth the risk.