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26 J. Soc. & Soc. Welfare 61 (1999)
A Commentary: Why Civil Commitment Laws Don't Work the Way They're Supposed to

handle is hein.journals/jrlsasw26 and id is 503 raw text is: A COMMENTARY: WHY CIVIL COMMITMENT LAWS DON'T WORK THE WAY THEY'RE SUPPOSED TO PHILIP D. ARBEN Central Michigan University Department of Management and Law It is often presumed that the legal rights of those who are mentally ill or alleged to be mentally ill are adequately protected by the changes in civil commitment statutes that most states instituted during the 1970s. The author who participated in the writing of these reform statutes re- cently observed 63 civil commitment hearings. The gap between the stated requirements of the statute and the actual conduct of the commitment hearings was substantial. This paper attempts to explain why the reality has failed to meet the promise. In the late 1960s and throughout the decade of the 1970s, substantial changes in the civil commitment laws in the United States were enacted. Prior to these changes a person could be committed to a mental hospital simply upon the certification of a physician that a person was mentally ill, and without benefit of any meaningful judicial review or oversight. The new statutes established a new and tougher standard of commitability-a person had to be both mentally ill and as a result of'that mental illness physically dangerous to themselves or others-and that determination had to be made by a judge or jury only after a judicial hearing that contained adequate due process procedures and safeguards. Physical dangerousness is conceived of as either direct physical injury to the person or others or as physical injury resulting from an inability to attend to basic physical needs such as food, clothing, and shelter. Recently there has been some retrogression in a small number of states where a lesser standard of mentally ill and in need of Journal of Sociology and Social Welfare, September, 1999, Volume XXVI, Number 3

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