flyingpurplepizzaeater:

Chemical restraint is not the same as actually helping someone. 

If you are trying to solve a problem by biochemically changing the way someone’s brain works, that requires their consent. It requires their consent no matter the circumstances, because some things are just never ever okay even if you have a really good reason. 

People who are aggressive are still people. Yes, someone’s right to swing their fist ends where someone else’s face begins, but someone’s right to their own brain does not end when they do things that hurt other people. I notice no one suggests that we should forcibly medicate, say, all parents who believe in spanking, or all therapists who believe in forcibly restraining people for nonviolent noncompliance. If people were suggesting that, that would be horrifying! 

Yes, aggression is bad for everyone. Yes, if an autistic person is hurting people that doesn’t suddenly become okay because they are autistic or they are in pain or any of that. But chemical restraint also hurts people, and that also matters. 

Not everyone feels this way, but I was medicated for a lot of things- it was supposed to control anxiety and aggressivity and stimming and my “problem” of trying to avoid people who were abusing me and maybe generalized defiance? and it was the most horrible thing that ever happened to me in my life by an order of magnitude. And, while my life is pretty good, it’s not like nothing bad has ever happened to me! I have experienced brain damage, and really horrible episodes of mental illness, and some stuff people seem to agree is pretty horrific abuse, and chronic pain, and stuff that might have technically counted as sexual assault. None of that even compares to the experience of being forcibly medicated, which I still have nightmares about. Part of it is what actually happened- I still can’t describe it very well, but I felt as if some of the best parts of me and my capacity for deep feeling had been sucked out my ears, and I had been dropped into a horror movie that didn’t make sense. Part of it is the horror of people having that amount of power over me, not just what people did do, but the fact that people can do stuff like that to me if they decide they want to, and there’s not that much I can do about it. My capacity to feel joy, or to not be physically ill, and whether my life is a horror movie is in the hands of people who still think that that medication helped me and made my life better. This drives my fear of doctors, which sometimes leads to me avoiding necessary medical care, and my fear of people in general, where whenever I talk to people I am afraid I’ll get them to say something to my parents that will get me drugged. The fear of being medicated also led to me not admitting that I was being abused in situations where I otherwise would have, and taking back confessions I did make because some people thought I was crazy. 

And I know people who have had way worse experiences with medication than I have, who are lucky they are still alive. 

I’m sure there are some situations where forced medication causes a good outcome- just as some people will testify that being spanked as a child helped them, but it is a still a bad idea to spank your child- but no one can know that that is going to happen in advance, and humans are humans. No one should have that amount of power over another person’s brain. The best case scenario for forced medication is that it actually helps, but the worst case scenario is that you end up basically torturing someone you care about and they can’t express it in a way you can understand, or are too afraid to, assuming you’re listening. 

Of course, if the person is okay with taking medication, and you can work with them to find a medication that helps with their impulse control or emotional problems or what have you and helps them hurt other people less, consensually, that is absolutely great. 

Being in a horrible untenable situation with no good solutions and not enough support doesn’t mean you have to resort to chemical restraint. If that’s you, I’m really really sorry and I’m sorry I don’t have a good solution for you. I have an article about some environment changes that can sometimes really help with aggression, many of which you may have already tried if you are considering chemical restraint, but I don’t have that much: 

https://wearelikeyourchild.blogspot.com/2014/05/a-checklist-for-identifying-sources-of.html