Is forced treatment for the mentally ill ever humane?
An old friend has a niece with a life-long, major mental illness.  When off her medications (I&#x27;ve lost count of how many times, over the years), she goes &quot;on the run&quot;, and phones home to various family members (often many times per day) with angry rants - which very often include threats of great bodily harm and&#x2F;or death.  Her grip on reality in that state is rather poor - asserting that Bugs Bunny and the CIA are conspiring to create a brain controlled army of polar bears with space lasers would not be unusual.<p>When on her medications, she is a relatively pleasant &amp; rational person, usually able to hold an entry-level job.<p>Her family do not want to throw her in jail for all the threats (I&#x27;m not asserting that they could, if they wanted to), she <i>really</i> does not like the side effects of her medications, and (under the current system) neither confining her to a long-term mental health facility, nor reliably forcing her to take her medications seem to be available options.  (Her family has talked to lawyers about their options more than once.)<p>What would be the &quot;humane&quot; thing to do?  In composing your answer, please recall that her family are also humans, and - barring a premature death - she is likely to outlive most of them.<p>Edit:  Thank you for all the replies, but my 4th-paragraph question was intended to be rhetorical.  My point is that the case-by-case reality, even from the PoV of a well-to-do family that really seems to care about the mentally ill person, is often agonizingly difficult.