Law Commons^™

Mental Health Care And Intimate Partner Violence: Unasked Questions, Delaney E. Anderson, Richard C. Boldt

Faculty Scholarship

There is significant overlap between the group of people who experience trauma, including domestic or intimate partner violence, and those who are hospitalized for severe mental illness. In recent years there has been a growing awareness in the mental health treatment community of the prevalence of trauma among individuals with behavioral health problems. Despite the strong evidence of elevated rates of exposure to domestic or intimate partner violence among individuals experiencing mental illness (including depression, anxiety, and posttraumatic stress disorder), mental health professionals often do not effectively address this co-occurring factor in assessing and treating their clients or patients. The …

Reimagining Criminal Justice: How We Traded Out Asylums For Prisons, Zaynah Zaman

Reimagining Criminal Justice

The criminal justice system fails to adopt alternative mental health reforms better equipped to handle mental health crises rather than placing the mentally ill in institutions that have proven to worsen their illness. The criminalization of mental illness must end, says Zaynah Zaman, a student at Golden Gate University School of Law.

Opinion: The Mental Health Parity And Addiction Equity Act: What Parity Means For New Hampshire, Lucy C. Hodder

Law Faculty Scholarship

[Excerpt] "New Hampshire lawyers can help clients and colleagues with mental health or substance use disorders by advising individuals how to overcome barriers to insurance coverage for treatment, and encouraging them to pursue state and federally mandated internal, external and expedited appeal opportunities when denied coverage."

The Danger Zone: How The Dangerousness Standard In Civil Commitment Proceedings Harms People With Serious Mental Illness, Sara Gordon

Scholarly Works

Almost every American state allows civil commitment upon a finding that a person, as a result of mental illness, is gravely disabled and unable to meet their basic needs for food and shelter. Yet in spite of these statutes, most psychiatrists and courts will not commit an individual until they are found to pose a danger to themselves or others. All people have certain rights to be free from unwanted medical treatment, but for people with serious mental illness, those civil liberties are an abstraction, safeguarded for them by a system that is not otherwise ensuring access to shelter and …

The Mirror Image Of Asylums And Prisons, Sacha Raoult, Bernard E. Harcourt

Faculty Scholarship

This article analyzes trends in prison rates and mental hospital rates in France since the earliest available statistics. It shows that, on almost two centuries of data and amidst an agitated political history, every asylum trend in France is "countered" by an inverse prison trend, and vice-versa. Both trends are like a mirror image of each other. We reflect on the possible explanations for this intriguing fact and show that the most obvious ones (a population transfer or a building transfer) are not able to account for most of the relationship. After these explanations have been dismissed, we are left …

All Illnesses Are (Not) Created Equal: Reforming Federal Mental Health Insurance Law, Stacey A. Tovino

Scholarly Works

This Article is the second, and most important, installment in a three-part series that presents a comprehensive challenge to lingering legal distinctions between physical and mental illness. The basic impetus for this historical, medical, and legal project is a belief that there exists no rational or consistent method of distinguishing physical and mental illness in the context of health insurance law. The first installment in this series narrowly inquired as to whether a particular set of disorders, the postpartum mood disorders, are or should be classified as physical or mental illnesses in a range of health law contexts.* This second …

Reforming State Mental Health Parity Law, Stacey A. Tovino

Scholarly Works

This Article is the final installment in a three-part project that presents a comprehensive challenge to lingering legal distinctions between physical and mental illness in the context of health insurance. The first installment in this series narrowly inquired as to whether the postpartum mood disorders should be classified as physical or mental illnesses in a range of health law contexts, including the context of health insurance. The second installment was broader in scope and challenged a number of federal provisions that allow publicly- and privately-funded health care programs and plans to provide mental health insurance benefits that are less comprehensive …

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 …

The Civilization Of The Criminal Law, Christopher Slobogin

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

This article explores the jurisprudential and practical feasibility of a "preventive" regime of criminal justice. More specifically, it examines an updated version of the type of government intervention espoused four decades ago by thinkers such as Barbara Wooton, Sheldon Glueck, and Karl Menninger. These individuals, the first a criminologist, the latter two mental health professionals, envisioned a system that is triggered by an antisocial act but that pays no attention to desert or even to general deterrence. Rather, the sole goal of the system they proposed is individual prevention through assessments of dangerousness and the provision of treatment designed to …

Police Training And Specialized Approaches For Responding To People With Mental Illnesses, Judy Hails, Randy Borum

Mental Health Law & Policy Faculty Publications

Eighty-four medium and large law enforcement agencies reported the amount of training provided on mental-health-related issues and the use of specialized responses for calls involving people with mental illnesses. Departments varied widely in the amount of training provided on mental-health-related topics, with a median of 6.5 hours for basic recruits and 1 hour for in-service training. Approximately one third of the agencies (32%) had some specialized response for dealing with calls involving people with mental illnesses. Twenty-one percent had a special unit or bureau within the department to assist in responding to these calls; 8% had access to a mental …

What Atkins Could Mean For People With Mental Illness, Christopher Slobogin

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

This article, written for a symposium on Atkins v. Virginia - the Supreme Court decision that prohibited execution of people with mental retardation - argues that people with severe mental illness must now also be protected from imposition of the death penalty. In labeling execution of people with mental retardation cruel and unusual, the Atkins majority stressed that mentally retarded people who kill are less blameworthy and less deterrable than the average murderer, an assertion that can also be made about people with severe mental illness. As it had in previous eighth amendment cases, however, the Court also relied heavily …

Giving A Voice To The Silent Mentally Ill Client: An Empirical Study Of The Role Of Counsel In The Civil Commitment Hearing, Donald H. Stone

All Faculty Scholarship

In the civil commitment arena, where a mentally ill person is allegedly a danger to the life or safety of themselves or of others and in need of in-patient care or treatment, there are two groups assigned to protect the people: one, the hospital presenter, who is responsible for investigating and presenting evidence and testimony at a hearing to secure admission to a psychiatric facility as an involuntary patient, the other, the lawyer, who represents and defends the allegedly mentally ill person from such involuntary civil commitment confinement. These are their stories.

The attorney representing a mentally ill client at …

The Criminal Defense Lawyer's Fiduciary Duty To Clients With Mental Disability, Christopher Slobogin, Amy Mashburn

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

This Article has argued that the defense attorney has a multifaceted fiduciary duty toward the client with mental disability. That duty requires, first and foremost, respect for the autonomy of the client. The lawyer shows that respect not only by heeding the wishes of the competent client but by refusing to heed the wishes of the incompetent client. A coherent approach to the competency construct is therefore important. Following the lead of Professor Bonnie, this Article has broken competency into two components: assistance competency and decisional competency. It has defined the former concept in traditional terms, as an understanding of …

What's Competence Got To Do With It: The Right Not To Be Acquitted By Reason Of Insanity, Justine A. Dunlap

Faculty Publications

An acquittal by reason of insanity is sufficiently adverse and is in many ways more akin to a conviction than to an outright acquittal. Although not technically punishment, it involves substantial infringement of rights. The legal literature has devoted significant space to the issue of a criminal defendant’s competence to stand trial and to the issue of the insanity plea. The problem of a pretrial insanity acquittal of an incompetent defendant, on the other hand, has not been extensively examined. In undertaking that task, this article will, in Part II, review the law and practice of competency determinations. Part III …

Report Of Seminar On Law And Medicine, Office Of Continuing Legal Education At The University Of Kentucky College Of Law, Charles M. Leibson, John A. Krichbaum, Paul A. Van Pernis, William C. Ball, Galen J. White, Harry N. Peterson, B. J. Anderson, Harvey L. Ruben, William D. Weitzel, Oliver Grant Bruton Jr., Oliver H. Barber Jr., Joe C. Savage, Robert J. Turnley, William G. Winter, L. T. Grant, William D. Grubbs, Charles Landrum Jr., Leslie G. Whitmer, Robert Rich, Edward A. Rothschild

Continuing Legal Education Materials

Reports from the UK/CLE Seminar on Law and Medicine held May 26-28, 1976.