Defining A Mental Health Court
Mental health courts vary from jurisdiction to jurisdiction, but most share a number of characteristics. The Council of State Governments Justice Center has defined the “essential elements” of mental health courts. The Justice Center, in a publication detailing the essential elements, notes that the majority of mental health courts share the following characteristics:
- A specialized court docket, which employs a problem-solving approach to court processing in lieu of more traditional court procedures for certain defendants with mental illnesses;
- Judicially supervised, community-based treatment plans for each defendant participating in the court, which a team of court staff and mental health professionals design and implement;
- Regular status hearings at which treatment plans and other conditions are periodically reviewed for appropriateness, incentives are offered to reward adherence to court conditions, and sanctions are imposed on participants who do not adhere to the conditions of participation;
- Criteria defining a participant’s completion of (sometimes called graduation from) the program.
Read more about this topic: Mental Health Court
Famous quotes containing the words defining, mental, health and/or court:
“Art, if one employs this term in the broad sense that includes poetry within its realm, is an art of creation laden with ideals, located at the very core of the life of a people, defining the spiritual and moral shape of that life.”
—Ivan Sergeevich Turgenev (1818–1883)
“It was at a particular moment in the history of my own rages that I saw the Western world conditioned by the images of Marx, Darwin and Freud; and Marx, Darwin and Freud are the three most crashing bores of the Western world. The simplistic popularization of their ideas has thrust our world into a mental straitjacket from which we can only escape by the most anarchic violence.”
—William Golding (b. 1911)
“The ideal of men and women sharing equally in parenting and working is a vision still. What would it be like if women and men were less different from each other, if our worlds were not so foreign? A male friend who shares daily parenting told me that he knows at his very core what his wife’s loving for their daughter feels like, and that this knowing creates a stronger bond between them.”
—Anonymous Mother. Ourselves and Our Children, by Boston Women’s Health Book Collective, ch. 6 (1978)
“The Twist was a guided missile, launched from the ghetto into the very heart of suburbia. The Twist succeeded, as politics, religion, and law could never do, in writing in the heart and soul what the Supreme Court could only write on the books.”
—Eldridge Cleaver (b. 1935)