Am J Psychiatry 1975; 132:924-927
Copyright © 1975 by American Psychiatric Association
Court-mandated treatment: dilemmas for hospital psychiatry
R Liss and A Frances
The authors present clinical material to illustrate the special treatment
and management problems posed by different types of mentally ill offenders;
they suggest that court-mandated hospital treatment is often destructive
and unrelated to the needs of the patient, the community, and the mental
institution. The failure to create new kinds of institutions, combining
modalities derived from the hospital and correctional systems, is traced to
poor communication among the disciplines involved. The "mentally ill
offender" is caught in the interplay of these systems and is consequently
both their victim and victimizer.
