Right, liberty and the pursuit of mental health.
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Procedural justice theory posits that the process by which disputes are resolved influences perceptions of fairness and satisfaction with outcomes, even if the outcomes are unfavorable. Within the context of civil commitment, Tyler (1992) has suggested that enhancing respondents' perceptions of procedural justice (i.e., participation, dignity, and trust) during commitment proceedings might facilitate accommodation to an adverse judicial determination (i.e., commitment) and subsequently enhance therapeutic outcomes. The study reported here used videotapes of mock commitment hearings to examine whether patients committed for involuntary treatment are sensitive to procedural justice manipulations. Results suggest that patients are sensitive to procedural justice manipulations and, further, that such manipulations are likely to influence the patients' attitude toward psychiatric care. These findings suggest that the development of strategies to enhance patients' perceptions of procedural justice in commitment hearings may indeed have positive therapeutic implications and warrants further investigation.
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California's civil commitment statute serves as a model for many other states. A move to update the California law may set national precedent.
While labeling theorists have focused on the informal stigma suffered by officially designated deviants, research has been less extensive on the formal legal rights lost upon state labeling. In this light, this study presents a survey of state statutes which focused on the legal rights lost by felons, the mentally incompetent, and the mentally ill. Five areas of rights (voting privileges, holding public office, jury duty, parenting, and divorce) restricted to the mentally ill and incompetent are examined in state statutes and contrasted with the findings of an earlier study of lost rights for felons by Burton, Cullen, and Travis (1987).
As a psychiatrist, I have focused in this paper on the medical model view of commitment. Directed against the medical model is the civil liberties position, mostly put forward by attorneys, which values autonomy over beneficence and sees psychiatric decision-making as biased, imprecise, and too paternalistic. Like the moral principles they champion, neither of these positions is "wrong." The tension between them is inevitable and sometimes beneficial. The conflict is inevitable because the proponents differ in their missions and how they think. Attorneys (and philosophers) think in terms of the general case, of classes of situations, whereas psychiatrists focus on individuals as unique. Chodoff has also pointed out that the medical model is a utilitarian one, i.e. the morality of an act is determined by, on balance, whether it increases the good for the individual or society. The civil liberties position, on the other hand, is a deontological one, i.e. the end does not justify the means; some moral principles must be considered even if they do not lead to maximally good outcomes. This conflict between positions can be ultimately beneficial, if we recognize that each is fighting for a good. As a society, we should expect psychiatrists and other mental health professionals to try their utmost to treat the mentally ill, and attorneys to protect their rights. When we view it as such a moral dilemma, "we are confronted not with melodrama, a contest of right against wrong, but rather with tragedy, a conflict of one right--to be at physical liberty--against another right--to be free dehumanizing disease."
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