1. Lots of people who need to be in a psychiatric hospital are being released after commitment hearings. No, according to the last state wide study in 1994, 84% of commitment hearings in Virginia end up with the subject of the hearing in the hospital, either involuntarily or converted to “voluntary”.
2. No one ever makes a false allegation of mental illness against someone for personal gain, vengeance or their own convenience. Nursing homes are notorious for using the commitment process to evict patients they don’t want. Spurned lovers have used the commitment process to take revenge. Adult children who do not want the responsibility of caring for aging parents have used the commitment process to have the state take their burden off their hands. A for profit hospital in Florida used deception to admit senior citizens to their psychiatric unit who had absolutely no history nor symptoms of mental illness.
3. Subjects of commitment (Patients/consumers) are well represented by lawyers in their hearings. In fact, lawyers are paid so little to represent folks in commitment hearings that it amounts to pro bono work without a tax break in many areas of the state. Given the low reimbursement, they do not have the time to mount a real defense of their assigned client, often meeting their client at the hearing or a few minutes before.
4. The commitment process is not traumatic and upsetting to the people who are subject to it. Somehow being dragged from their home or the street in handcuffs and sometimes in shackles as well, being searched, being held against their will in a strange place and being told they are not competent is not supposed to bother or upset people with mental illness the way it would anybody else. In fact, some will say that if a person is psychotic at the time, they won’t even remember the experience. There is NO evidence that people who are psychotic lose their memory of what happens while they are psychotic.
June 16, 2007 at 10:32 pm
About myth #3 (”Patients/consumers are well represented by lawyers in their hearings”), I’m pretty sure that in some states there is no requirement for any legal representation at all. I’m virtually certain that people can be legally sentenced to psych institutions in some states without ever having access to a lawyer of any kind, not even a very low paid one. They can be committed just on the basis of being interviewed by a psychiatrist who has been paid to give an opinion.
Maybe Virginia and some other states might require that a person being subject to a commitment hearing have some kind of token legal representation, but that’s far from universal. At least not for civil commitments – perhaps the due process requirements are more stringent for people who’ve been accused of a crime and are undergoing some kind of a criminal commitment hearing.
June 16, 2007 at 10:46 pm
Hmm, I haven’t heard of a state that doesn’t require token legal representation for civil commitment beyond the intial detention for evaluation. Maybe that’s what you are thinking of? What state doesn’t require a lawyer for commitment after evaluation? That’s horrible if there is such a state.
June 17, 2007 at 2:40 pm
Many years ago I was a voluntary patient at a private psych institution in Connecticut. After several weeks, (or perhaps it was months), I decided I wanted to leave. My relatives didn’t want me to leave, so they paid someone to initiate commitment proceedings. I’m virtually certain I had no contact with a lawyer of any kind.
All I remember of the whole experience is being interviewed by a psychiatrist who came to the institution and asked me a few questions in a small private room on the ward where I was confined (just me and the psychiatrist in the room, noone else).
But as I say, that was many years ago (in the 1970s), and a few months (or possibly weeks) later I had a series of shock treatments at that institution (about eight in all I think), so it’s possible I may have forgotten some of the details of the whole experience. It’s also possible the laws in Connecticut might have changed since then.
From what I learned later of the experience, I think the main reason for the psychiatrist deciding against me was a nervous tic I displayed at the time of every few seconds wiping my hands on my shirt.
June 17, 2007 at 6:06 pm
I’m so sorry that happened to you. It may not have been anything about your behavior at all, it may have just been that it was what your family wanted. Families have a lot of power in these situations, contrary to popular belief/propaganda, especially if they are paying the bill for treatment. Again, I’m sorry you went through that.
June 17, 2007 at 6:51 pm
Oh, I’m sure that that shrink was seeking any excuse to come to the conclusion that he was being paid to arrive at, and if it hadn’t been that particular tic it would’ve probably been something else. But based on something one of the aides told me later I’m pretty sure that was the excuse he used (or at least one of the excuses).
Anyway, my point was that I’m pretty sure I remember enough about the whole experience to know that I had absolutely no contact of any kind with an attorney. From that I conclude that the state had no law requiring that they pretend to provide legal representation for people facing commitment hearings, and if such was the case in Connecticut it was probably also true in other states. Perhaps I’m extrapolating too much from that to assume that that means the situation is the same today, but such things seem seldom to change for the better.
And what good would a lawyer do in such circumstances, anyway, if it’s all just a matter of whatever expert “diagnosis” is given? How could a lawyer argue against something that requires no standard of evidence? It seems that the best a lawyer would be able to ever do is to broker some kind of a compromise.
June 17, 2007 at 7:21 pm
Yes, that’s the big problem with commitment hearings. The subject of the commitment hearing almost never has an expert of his or her own to counter the state’s expert. In Virginia we have supposedly independent evaluators, but they are paid so little in most counties (with the exception of Fairfax and other parts of Northern Virginia) that they spend about 15 minutes doing the “evaluation” and aren’t even required to be present to be cross examined at the hearing, which itself lasts a very short time. Lawyers are only paid 75 dollars a case so it’s basically pro bono work with no tax deduction and no incentive to vigorously represent their client. Also many lawyers think that they are representing their client by getting them to agree to commitment or not fighting the commitment because they think they know what is best for their client and don’t think they are ethically bound (as they are) to represent what their client wants.
June 19, 2007 at 4:23 pm
In my involutary civil commitment hearing in Alabama, Albert Bulls III, a thrice divorced lawyer with a history of cocaine addiciton and friend of my father’s, was appointed for me as required by law. Unfortunately he was not notified of my hearing until after it occured which violates Alabama Law. However, his defense, in the pending lawsuit I brought against him for legal malpractice is this: “I did not object to the false order for involuntary civil commitment being entered or to being paid for attending a hearing I admit I didn’t know about because I think I may have seen Ms. Russell in the car with a known drug user.” The laws are on the books in at least some states. The problem is often the NAMI/Fuller/etc. funding argument that the laws harm the mental defective and thus should be violated.
June 19, 2007 at 4:28 pm
I’m so sorry that happened to you Sally. That’s just wrong. I wonder how they justified holding the hearing and paying the lawyer when he didn’t even show up. Good for you for suing him. Have you been in touch with PsychRights about your case? http://psychrights.org/index.htm I’m sure they would be interested in knowing about someone suing the attorney who didn’t represent them in a commitment hearing.
Good luck with your case.