Mental Health Law
All but four states in the U.S. allow for some form of involuntary treatment for mental illness for short periods of time under emergency conditions, although criteria vary. Since the late 1990s, a growing number of states have adopted Assisted Outpatient Commitment (AOC) laws.
Under "assisted" outpatient commitment, people committed involuntarily can live outside the psychiatric hospital, sometimes under strict conditions including reporting to mandatory psychiatric appointments, taking psychiatric drugs in the presence of a nursing team, and proving medication blood levels. Forty-two states presently allow for outpatient commitment.
Read more about this topic: Involuntary Treatment
Famous quotes containing the words mental health, mental, health and/or law:
“Mental health data from the 1950’s on middle-aged women showed them to be a particularly distressed group, vulnerable to depression and feelings of uselessness. This isn’t surprising. If society tells you that your main role is to be attractive to men and you are getting crow’s feet, and to be a mother to children and yours are leaving home, no wonder you are distressed.”
—Grace Baruch (20th century)
“You don’t want to be an animal, you want to observe your own animal functions, so as to get a mental thrill out of them. It is all purely secondary—and more decadent than the most hide-bound intellectualism.”
—D.H. (David Herbert)
“The years when we are parenting teenagers are the high point, the crest when everything seems to be in bright colors and in ten-foot letters.”
—Jean Jacobs Speizer. Ourselves and Our Children, by Boston Women’s Health Collective, ch. 4 (1978)
“I am now quite lame, from scuffling, all my fingers stiffened by playing ball. Pretty business for a law student. Yes, pretty enough; why not? Good exercise and great sport.”
—Rutherford Birchard Hayes (1822–1893)