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6 Wake Forest Intramural L. Rev. 21 (1970)
The Justifications for Medical Commitment--Real or Illusory

handle is hein.journals/wflr6 and id is 49 raw text is: THE JUSTIFICATIONS FOR MEDICAL COMMITMENT-REAL OR ILLUSORY Loren J. Siegel* INTRODUCTION Most people prefer not to think about the quandary of the mental patient. In a society where eccentricity is more feared than corruption, such apathy is not surprising. Yet, it has been estimated that one out of every ten Americans will, at some point during his lifetime, suffer from a mental disorder sufficiently incapacitating to require hospitalization. For most people, the term mental illness evokes a number of stereotypic images-the homicidal maniac, the village idiot, or the immobile vegetable. But these vagaries tend to obfuscate the real and prodigious issues and problems surrounding the definition and disposition of the mentally ill. Although admission rates continue to soar, there is a growing concern that the state mental institution is an awkward anachronism and that the state statutes which perpetuate and legitimize.them are far behind in the movement towards greater constitutional and statutory protection for all citizens. The mentally ill have been afforded by law the least protection of any class of people subject to involuntary commitment. State legislatures have established standardized codes of criminal procedure to protect the rights of criminal defendants. In New York State, drug addicts, mental defectives and persons suffering from communicable diseases are all entitled to judicial hearings and/or jury trials prior to commitment. But the rights of the civilly commitable mentally ill have been rather conspicuously neglected. They are unique in that they can be deprived of their liberty without having been convicted of a crime, and without the benefit of prior substantive or even procedural scrutiny as to the propriety of their commitment. There is no paucity of scholarship on the question of the mentally ill and their constitutional deprivations. The problem has been the subject of research, criticism and reportage by muckraking journalists, apostate psychiatrists, sociologists and lawyers.2 But despite the *Assistant to the Director, Civil Liberties and Mental Illness Project, New York Civil Liberties Union. B.A., Bennington College. 1. The Association of the Bar of the City of New York, Mental Illness and Due Process, (Ithaca, New York, 1962) p. v. 2. See. e.g.. T. Szasz, Law, Liberty and Psychiatry (1963); A. DERSHOWITZ, J. KATZ and J. GOLDSTEIN, PSYCHOANALYSIS, PSYCHIATRY & LAW (1967); E. GOFFMAN, ASYLUMS (1961); T. SCHEFF, BEING MENTALLY ILL (1966).

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