Prodigy wins right to refuse drugs

Jun. 15, 2001. 01:42 AM The Toronto Star

Prodigy wins right to refuse drugs
Medication could slow mentally ill man's thinking, court says

Tracey Tyler
LEGAL AFFAIRS REPORTER

A physics prodigy who suffers from manic depression has triumphed over two
psychiatrists in a long-running court battle over their right to treat him
with mood-altering drugs.

Professor Scott Starson has the right to refuse the drugs that could slow
his thinking down to normal levels, the Ontario Court of Appeal ruled
yesterday.

Starson understands he is mentally ill and that refusing treatment could end
up keeping him confined to a psychiatric hospital, the court said.

But he has also concluded that taking the drugs would prevent him from
engaging in the scientific research that has given his life meaning, a
development he feels would be ``worse than death,'' the appeal panel said.

``Professor Starson is an exceptionally intelligent man,'' Justices James
Carthy, John Laskin and Stephen Goudge said in upholding a judge's decision
in 1999 to overturn a provincial review board's finding that he was
incapable of making decisions about treatment.

``Although he has no formal qualifications in that field, he is in regular
contact with some of the leading physicists in the world,'' the court said.

Pierre Noyes, director of the Linear Accelerator Centre at Stanford
University in California, describes Starson's thinking in the field of
physics as ``10 years ahead of its time.''

Starson, 45, represented himself before the court last year.

His long-time lawyer, Anita Szigeti, said the panel's 3-0 decision yesterday
is important because it sends a message to psychiatric review boards that
they can't always take a ``paternalistic'' approach to patient treatment.

But Starson's mother, Jeanne Stevens, was heartsick over the decision.

``You know what the problem is? They didn't include me,'' she said,
describing her son as a man of ``great potential'' suffering without
medication.

``He thinks he's superman. He thinks he's the most brilliant person in the
world,'' Stevens said in an interview. ``I adore my son, the man that is my
son. He is truly such a good-natured, gentle, fascinating, beautiful person,
but his illness has destroyed me. It's been devastating.''

Starson has been in mental institutions several times in the past 15 years,
the court said. In 1998 he was found not criminally responsible, due to his
mental disorder, after he was charged with uttering threats against fellow
residents of a rooming house.

The Ontario Review Board ordered him detained in January, 1999, at the
Centre for Addiction and Mental Health in Toronto. Psychiatrists proposed to
treat him with mood stabilizers, anti-psychotic and anti-anxiety drugs and
medication to combat Parkinson's disorder, but he refused.

The psychiatrists offered no evidence that any of the drugs previously
forced on Starson had actually helped him, the appeal court said