Tag: Mental Health

Is California Committed?: Why California Should Take Action to Address the Shortcomings of its Assisted Outpatient Commitment Statute – Note by Andrea Reynoso

From Volume 88, Number 4 (May 2015)
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The history of the treatment of mental illness in the United States is anything but simple. While both social and scientific understanding of mental illness have developed tremendously in recent decades, there remain significant barriers to implementing effective treatment and rehabilitation programs for people with mental illness. Inherent in this intersection of law and mental health is the delicate balance between preserving liberty and autonomy interests on the one hand, and providing for individual and societal safety on the other. This balance is not easily achieved and remains the core debate surrounding much of today’s mental health legislation.

 

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The New York Safe Act: A Thoughtful Approach to Gun Control, or a Politically Expedient Response to the Public’s Fear of the Mentally Ill? – Postscript (Note) by Matthew Gamsin

From Volume 88, Number 2 (January 2015)
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This Note will first review the historical development of gun-control laws in the United States, including those referred to by the Supreme Court as “longstanding prohibitions on the possession of firearms by . . . the mentally ill.” It will then analyze the extent to which the SAFE Act differs from such longstanding prohibitions and whether the Act is constitutional. Finally, this Note will consider whether, regardless of its constitutionality, the SAFE Act is an appropriate legislative response to gun violence or whether a recent proposal by a group of national experts on mental illness and gun violence might be more effective and more likely to pass constitutional muster.

 

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Beyond No-Man’s Land: Psychiatry’s Imprecision Revealed by Its Critique of SVP Statutes as Applied to Pedophilia – Note by Jennifer Jason

From Volume 83, Number 6 (September 2010)
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The field of psychiatry has identified a problem with the law, its source, and suggested a solution. The problem is “legislators . . . us[ing] psychiatric commitment [of sex offenders] to effect nonmedical societal ends.” The source is U.S. Supreme Court decisions allowing legislatures to use definitions of mental illness that have no basis in psychiatry: “As a consequence of U.S. Supreme Court decisions that are written ambiguously and tentatively, the bright line separating . . . [the legal conception of] mental disorder [(for the purposes of civilly committing sex offenders under sexually violent predator statutes)] from ordinary criminal behavior is difficult to draw and tests a no-man’s land between psychiatry and the law.” 

The solution is “[g]reater clarity and standardization . . . com[ing] from both sides: the legalists who interpret the law and the clinicians who apply and work under it.” A close analysis of the psychiatric critique of these statutes that allow for the civil commitment of sex offenders reveals psychiatry’s own imprecision within the bounds of psychiatry and in the domain of the overlap between psychiatry and the law.

 

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