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The Tail Still Wags The Dog: The Pervasive And Inappropriate Influence By The Psychiatric Profession On The Civil Commitment Process, William Brooks
The Tail Still Wags The Dog: The Pervasive And Inappropriate Influence By The Psychiatric Profession On The Civil Commitment Process, William Brooks
Scholarly Works
The imposition of substantive and procedural protections in the civil commitment process thirty years ago created the expectation that courts would scrutinize commitment decisions by psychiatrists more closely and serve as a check on psychiatric decision-making. This has not happened.
Today, psychiatrists continue to play an overly influential role in the civil commitment process. Psychiatrists make initial commitment decisions that often lack accuracy because they rely on clinical judgment only. Furthermore, many psychiatrists do not want legal standards interfering with treatment decisions, and the nebulous nature of the concept of dangerousness enables doctors to make pretextual assessments of danger. At …
Dangerous Decisions: An Essay On The Mathematics Of Clinical Violence Prediction And Involuntary Hospitalization, Douglas Mossman Md
Dangerous Decisions: An Essay On The Mathematics Of Clinical Violence Prediction And Involuntary Hospitalization, Douglas Mossman Md
Faculty Articles and Other Publications
This Article has two major purposes. First, it provides a mathematical
description of an ideal procedure for making clinical decisions about patients'
future violence, a description that provides a context for evaluating clinicians'
"dangerousness decisions." For purposes of illustration, the Article uses a specific clinical situation-deciding whether to hospitaize involuntarily a patient
based on his risk of harming another. The Article argues that the decision
involves balancing potential risks to third parties (often the patient's family
members) with the "massive deprivation of liberty and other potential
harms to the patient that could result from confinement. The mathematical
description of the …