Schizophrenia ‘not a mental disorder’, Pakistan’s Supreme Court rules
SCHIZOPHRENIA is not a mental disorder, a Pakistan top court ruled this week, paving the way for the execution of a mentally ill man convicted of murder.
According to Reuters, the court said although the 50-year-old Imdad Ali was diagnosed in 2012 as a paranoid schizophrenic, the condition did not fall within the legal definition of mental disorders.
In the decision by the three-judge bench of Pakistan’s supreme court led by Chief Justice Anwer Zaheer Jamali, the ruling said the condition was “not a permanent mental disorder”.
“It is, therefore, a recoverable disease, which, in all the cases, does not fall within the definition of ‘mental disorder’,” the judges were quoted as saying in Thursday’s verdict.
The court based the verdict on two dictionary terms for ‘schizophrenia’, and cited a Supreme Court judgement made in neighbouring India in 1988.
As a result of the ruling, Imdad could be sent to the gallows as early as next week on charges of murdering a cleric in 2001.
His lawyers, however, insist he is unfit to be executed as he is unable to understand his crime and punishment, and that doing so would violate Pakistan’s obligations under the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, a United Nations treaty.
The term schizophrenia has been defined as “a serious mental illness characterised by incoherent or illogical thoughts, bizarre behavior and speech, and delusions or hallucinations, such as hearing voices,” according to the The American Psychological Association.
Imdad was certified as having the condition in 2012. A government psychiatrist, Dr Tahir Feroze, who has treated Imdad for the last eight years with two other doctors said he suffers from delusions that he controls the world, is persecuted and was commanded by voices in his head, symptoms that Imdad’s wife Safia Bano says that her husband faced.
“He is completely delusional,” Safia said.
Imdad’s lawyer said the court had dismissed the medical records and a affidavit from his doctor, adding the government report confirming the man’s condition was not presented to court before this year.
Maya Foa, director of a British-based rights group called Reprieve said the verdict was “outrageous”.
“It is outrageous for Pakistan’s Supreme Court to claim that schizophrenia is not a mental illness, and flies in the face of accepted medical knowledge, including Pakistan’s own mental health laws,” Maya said.
Since reintroducing the death penalty in 2014, Pakistan has executed 425 people. The reintroduction of the death penalty was prompted by the mass killing of more than 150 schoolchildren at a Penshawar school by Taliban gunmen.
Imdad’s wife said she would seek forgiveness from the family of the murder victim in a last ditch attempt at allowing her husband to be spared execution that could take place as early as Wednesday.
Under Islamic law, the victim’s family’s forgiveness may reverse the decision to execute a convicted murderer.
“We have contacted some people who are close to his family,” she said. “But they have so far refused to meet us.”
