NCJ Number
90621
Date Published
1983
Length
11 pages
Annotation
The only way to make civil commitment provide due process safeguards and guarantee that patients receive good treatment is to make parens patriae the sole justification for involuntary confinement.
Abstract
Civil commitment as well as all other intersections of law and psychiatry have been abused in the United States. The constitutional decisions resulting from the civil Libertarian perspective have allowed intervention only to protect society, based on the police power of the state. Our fear of the mentally ill has produced the false assumptions that most mentally ill persons are dangerous and that most dangerous persons are mentally ill. This false assumption has caused much harm, since psychiatry cannot offer scientific predictions about who is dangerous, rehabilitate most dangerous persons, or solve the problems of violence in our society. Civil commitment should be stripped of its police power function. People believed by law enforcement authorities to be dangerous should be relegated to the criminal process. If such people need psychiatric treatment, it should be provided in the prisons. The court should consider five questions: whether the psychiatrist convincingly diagnosed severe illness, whether the patent's objection to the proposed treatment is irrational and indicates incompetence, and whether the patient or the attorney has a tenable objection to the proposed treatment. Supreme Court decisions have met neither these criteria nor those of the civil libertarians, although the decisions may be correct by other sets of criteria. Nevertheless, the court has recognized that neither the civil Libertarians nor the psychiatrists have all the answers, and that both must recognize the necessity of meeting needs of patients. Eight footnotes are provided.