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Full-Text Articles in Medicine and Health Sciences
The Paradox Of Personality: Mental Illness, Employment Discrimination, And The Americans With Disabilities Act, Deirdre M. Smith
The Paradox Of Personality: Mental Illness, Employment Discrimination, And The Americans With Disabilities Act, Deirdre M. Smith
Faculty Publications
Both medicine and the law devote considerable concern to drawing lines, that is, to classifying and making distinctions. In medicine, such line-drawing occurs when a person is designated healthy or ill, normal or disordered. In the law, such line-drawing determines who does and does not bear legal responsibility for a given situation. This Article reviews the demarcation drawn by psychiatry and the courts between disfavored personality and mental illness, a dichotomy not based upon empirical science and therefore, wholly susceptible to social construction and implementation. While society may pathologize noxious personalities, thus making them disabilities, it is loath to extend …
The Sympathetic Discriminator: Mental Illness, Hedonic Costs, And The Ada, Elizabeth F. Emens
The Sympathetic Discriminator: Mental Illness, Hedonic Costs, And The Ada, Elizabeth F. Emens
Faculty Scholarship
Social discrimination against people with mental illness is widespread. Treating people differently on the basis of mental illness does not provoke the same moral outrage as that inspired by differential treatment on the basis of race, sex, or even physical disability. Indeed, many people would freely admit preferring someone who does not have a mental illness as a neighbor, dinner party guest, parent, partner, or person in the next seat on the subway. Moreover, more than ten years after the Americans with Disabilities Act (the "ADA" or "Act") expressly prohibited private employers from discriminating on the basis of mental, as …