Although people have the legal right to say no to taking pharmaceutical drugs, caregivers of mentally ill patients can go to court to force them to take medication. Whether this is ethically warranted or not is the subject of a new investigation, available as a preprint, by two doctors: Gail Tasch, a psychiatrist based in Wisconsin, and Peter Gøtzsche, a medical doctor and scientific researcher. Gøtzsche, based in Copenhagen, Denmark, was the co-founder of the Nordic Cochrane Collaboration. Their study looked at a cohort of 30 patients in Alaska. It found that the patients’ rights and safety were systematically violated by their psychiatrists and the judges who sided with their doctors.
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