John Petrila & Corine De Ruiter: "The Competing Faces of Mental Health Law: Recovery and Access versus the Expanding Use of Preventive Confinement"

John Petrila, Profesor at the University of South Florida, and Corine De Ruiter posted "The Competing Faces of Mental Health Law: Recovery and Access versus the Expanding Use of Preventive Confinement" on SSRN:

Mental illnesses are an enormously important public health issue. Many nations are struggling to create adequate treatment capacity, based on advances in treatment philosophies, treatment modalities, and the codification of the rights of people with mental illnesses. However, preventive confinement is increasingly used to indefinitely confine classes of individuals based on sometimes substandard clinical testimony on diagnosis and future risk. The expanding use of preventive confinement threatens to draw already scarce resources from the treatment of many people with serious mental illnesses to focus on a handful of individuals thought to be dangerous to society. This has serious implications for the future of public mental health care.