Constitutional law--mental health--a patient involuntarily civilly committed to a state mental hospital has a constitutional right to treatment.

A call for minds: the unknown extent of societal influence on the legal rights of involuntarily and voluntarily committed mental health patients.

This article begins and ends with a call for more empirical research to understand the connection between societal views of mental illness and the legal system. The author asserts that changing social perceptions of mental illness certainly affect legal outcomes and commitment levels, but the degree remains unknown. This article explores the above two topics through the framework of the Circuit...

The Antidotes to the Double Standard: Protecting the Healthcare Rights of Mentally Ill Inmates by Blurring the Line Between Estelle and Youngberg.

This Note is an examination of mentally ill inmates' constitutional right to treatment. It has significant doctrinal and practical implications. In terms of doctrine, the Supreme Court has created distinct standards for the minimum levels of care for inmates (Estelle) and the civilly committed mentally ill (Youngberg). Under this framework mentally ill inmates are constitutionally equivalent to...

o'Connor v. Donaldson: due process and the involuntarily civilly committed mental patient.

Substituted judgement and the right to refuse shock treatment in Washington: In re Schuoler.

One of the most significant developments in modern constitutional thought revolves around judicial protection of fundamental privacy and liberty interests.' These interests are derived from the first, eighth, and fourteenth amendments, the "penumbra" of privacy rights found generally in the Bill of Rights,2 and the common law doctrine of informed consent.' Courts have held these interests to be...

The impact of the right to refuse treatment in a forensic patient population: six-month review.

In December of 1987, the Wisconsin supreme court held that all involuntarily committed mental patients in the state had the right to refuse psychotropic medication unless a court held that they were incompetent to make treatment decisions. The authors studied the effects of this decision in a 165-bed forensic hospital over the first six months after implementation of the decision. They found th...