Phase 1 · Understand the Body — Why the disease behaves the way it does.
The One-Line Truth
The whole disease in one chain
Everything on this page exists to explain this line.
Capacity means you can understand the facts, see how they apply to you, reason through your options, and tell someone your choice.
Air traffic control tower losing radar
Your brain is an airport: the prefrontal cortex (control tower) plans flight paths and checks safety; the amygdala (security) scans for threats; the hippocampus (flight log) records what happened; dopamine (fuel supply), serotonin (maintenance crew), and GABA (braking system) keep everything running. When chronic stress, psychosis, or a medical crisis hits, it's like the control tower loses power and radar at the same time. The security desk starts screaming about fake threats because no one is checking their work. The flight log burns so the pilots cannot remember why they took off. The fuel runs low or spills everywhere. Now pilots cannot understand landing instructions, cannot see why they should land, cannot think through the options, and cannot tell the tower what they want to do—so they crash, and we have to physically grab the controls to prevent disaster. That forced landing is the involuntary hold. But the real fix is restoring the power to the tower and the radar, not just holding the plane on the ground.
Appelbaum PS. Assessment of Patients' Competence to Consent to Treatment. NEJM 2007 · EMTALA and the Patient Anti-Dumping Law (CMS guidance on psychiatric screening and stabilization) · APA Practice Guideline for the Psychiatric Evaluation of Adults, 3rd ed. 2016 · Grisso T, Appelbaum PS. Assessing Competence to Consent to Treatment: A Guide for Physicians and Other Health Professionals. Oxford 1998 · reviewed 2026-07-07