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Justice, Mental Health, And Therapeutic Jurisprudence, David B. Wexler

Cleveland State Law Review

Mental health law advocates and even scholars have typically been hostile toward, afraid of, or at best indifferent to, the mental health disciplines (mainly psychiatry and psychology) and their practitioners. Learning to be skeptical of supposed scientific expertise is an important lesson, and the law should never simply defer to psychiatry and the related disciplines. But to the extent that the legal system now ignores developments in the mental health disciplines, the lesson of healthy skepticism has been overlearned. It is my thesis, then, that those of us interested in 'justice" in mental health law ought not to adopt the …