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The Law And Psychiatry Wars, 1960-1980, Sheldon Gelman

Law Faculty Articles and Essays

The chapter of the book excerpted below examines litigation developments from the late 1960s to the early 1980s. In law no less than in psychiatry, professional judgments produced anomalous results and professional processes worked in unexpected ways when it came to medications. These departures advanced a public mental health vision that was functionally the same as psychiatrists', even if couched in utterly different and more legalistic terms. Psychiatrists hailed medications as a medical revolution; lawyers by and large ignored the drugs. Yet, both professions reached the same general conclusions about what should be done.Commentators at the time saw an emerging …