One of the biggest problems associated with the treatment of mental health problems is that patients are often resistant to the idea of treatment. In order to understand that medication is required to help them get better, a patient needs to be in a rational frame of mind – which of course many mental illnesses prevent. Now, a new invention could help doctors to track the medication of mentally ill patients so that they can ensure that they are taking their pills properly.
Inventor Don Spector has created the device, which can be used on smart phones, but has received criticism. Whilst he argues that he only has patients’ wellness and wellbeing at heart, others argue that this is an invasion of privacy. Those in favour of the new system argue that it is more dangerous to allow people to be unsupervised in the community when they are really only safe whilst on medication, citing devastating examples of mental illness, such as in the case of the Sandy Hook school shootings.
Cases where patients have committed other serious crimes after lowering their doses of medication have also been cited, with some saying that perhaps the technology could be used selectively, such as in the case of patients who were at risk of committing violent crimes (perhaps those with a history of mental illness and violent behaviour).
The system works by having trackers on the pills to see whether they have been ingested or not. Responding to criticism that people could simply carry the pills in their pocket to trick the device into thinking that they had been ingested, the inventor responded that there will be ways for the device to tell whether or not the pill has been dissolved in the bloodstream.
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