Can Mandatory Treatment Be Therapeutic?

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Nothing is more highly valued in America than individual freedom. In the mental health arena there has been a great debate over patients' rights to freedom and autonomy versus society's responsibility to treat individuals in need and to protect people from the dangerous behaviors that can accompany major mental illness. From the 1960s through the early 1980s commitment laws were rewritten to increase patients' individual freedom and autonomy. Some argue that the balance has shifted back, however, with a reemergence of coercive interventions, often in community settings. There is legitimate concern that these new coercive interventions have been poorly studied, that their effectiveness is largely unknown, and that they are being applied to increasingly large and disparate populations. This sourcebook provides the differing perspectives on mandatory treatment of mental health care consumers, their family members, and advocates of therapeutic jurisprudence. It also supplies data on the effectiveness of mandatory treatment in community-based systems of care and examines some of the more controversial aspects of mandatory treatment. This is the 75th issue of the quarterly journal New Directions for Mental Health Services.