The Evolution of Mental Health Law

A study of the evolution of mental health law. The volume brings together contributions from the field's many domains, including lawyers, health policy specialists, forensic psychologists, law professors, psychiatrists and sociologists, who share theoretical insights and empirical research.

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The Evolution of Mental Health Law chronicles a relatively new field that has developed around the goals of protecting the rights and needs of people with disabilities, defining the proper sphere of individualization in criminal justice, and drawing boundaries between science and morality in decision making. The editors have brought together leading specialists from the field's many domains, including lawyers, health policy specialists, forensic psychologists, law professors, psychiatrists, and sociologists, who share their theoretical insights and empirical research of significant developments in mental health law and policy in the past 25 years. Particularly notable are chapters that examine shifts in attitudes toward the use of human participants in research; whether the statutory and regulatory framework of the increasingly privatized public mental health services system adequately protects patients' rights; how notions of therapeutic jurisprudence influence the behaviour of judges and lawyers; and the means by which judges, lawyers, and clinicians can work from a more therapeutic frame of reference in the context of civil commitment proceedings.
This volume fills an important gap in the field and will be useful to specialists in law, psychology, and psychiatry involved in mental health law and policy.