Being able to convince a doctor that I'm sane is more important to me than whether it takes 2 days or 19!
Why is that? That's the case if you need psychiatric certification for a job or a medical procedure or something. But generally, being locked up somewhere people can make you take arbitrary medication is bad, and grows worse over time (medication kicking in and unsafe to quit too quickly, effects of detention, damage to your outside life), whereas a piece of paper telling you to take some medication can be ignored. Is there something I'm missing, like insurance premiums?
My preference ordering:
Declared sane and released after 2 days > declared sane and released after 19 days > declared insane and released after 2 days > declared insane and released after 19 days.
I agree that some people might switch the ordering of the second and third outcomes.
I haven't seen any links to this on Lesswrong yet, and I just discovered it myself. It's extremely interesting, and has a lot of implications for how the way that people perceive and think of others are largely determined by their environmental context. It's also a fairly good indict of presumably common psychiatric practices, although it's also presumably outdated by now. Maybe some of you are already familiar with it, but I thought I'd mention it and post a link for those of you who aren't.
There's probably newer research on this, but I don't have time to investigate it at the moment.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosenhan_experiment