Law Commons^™

When Coercion Lacks Care: Competency To Make Medical Treatment Decisions And Parens Patriae Civil Commitments, Dora W. Klein

Faculty Articles

The subject of this Article is people who have been civilly committed under a state’s parens patriae authority to care for those who are unable to care for themselves. These are people who, because of a mental illness, are a danger to themselves. Even after they have been determined to be so disabled by their mental illness that they cannot care for themselves, many are nonetheless found to be competent to refuse medical treatment. Competency to make medical treatment decisions generally requires only a capacity to understand a proposed treatment, not an actual or rational understanding of that treatment. This …

Unreasonable: Involuntary Medications, Incompetent Criminal Defendants, And The Fourth Amendment, Dora W. Klein

Faculty Articles

Involuntary medical treatment potentially compromises several individual constitutional interests. However, like all individual constitutional rights, rights under both the Due Process Clause and the Fourth Amendment can be outweighed by sufficiently important governmental interests.

To determine whether involuntary medical treatment violates the Due Process Clause, courts ask whether the government’s interest that the treatment advances is important enough to justify compromising the individual’s interest in making an autonomous decision to refuse medical treatment. Involuntary treatment must also be medically appropriate, but any physical harms that the treatment might cause are not balanced directly against the government’s interest.

When the government …

Autonomy And Acute Psychosis: When Choices Collide, Dora W. Klein

Faculty Articles

Professor Elyn Saks is a well-recognized expert in mental health law, and is training to become a psychoanalyst. Her latest book reflects her continued interest in mental health issues, but this book differs from her previous works because it is written in the voice of someone who has a personal stake in the topic.

In The Center Cannot Hold: My Journey Through Madness, Saks recounts her own experience of schizophrenia, the most serious of all mental illnesses. Beginning with some “little quirks” in childhood and progressing to full-fledged psychosis by her first year at Yale Law School, Sak’s illness caused …

Unbuckling The Chemical Straitjacket: The Legal Significance Of Recent Advances In The Pharmacological Treatment Of Psychosis, Douglas Mossman Md

Faculty Articles and Other Publications

Antipsychotic medications figure prominently in the rapidly-growing field of mental disability law. Although the properties of antipsychotic medications are medical matters, legal scholars, judges, and practicing attorneys often need to understand what these drugs do. Yet the legal database - the principal or sole information source cited and consulted by legal thinkers - is often a source of confusion or misinformation about the actions of antipsychotic drugs and the scientific basis for prescribing them. The potential for misunderstanding antipsychotic treatment has increased since the arrival of "novel" or "aytpical" antipsychotic drugs, which cause fewer side effects than drugs that were …

Decoding Right To Refuse Treatment Law, Michael L. Perlin

Articles & Chapters

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