Britney Spears faced involuntary commitment. Is that wrong?
The Associated Press

Was it wrong to hospitalize Britney Spears?

Featured Topic | Posted 39 weeks 4 days ago

What rights do the mentally ill have? Britney Spears, Illinois gunman put the question in focus

A Los Angeles judge orders pop star Britney Spears into psychiatric treatment. A lawyer says Spears is an adult and she's being denied her rights. A graduate student in Illinois goes off his medication and goes on a shooting spree. A judge in Virginia says a Virginia Tech student poses a danger to himself and others, but the law cannot hold him.

How society should treat its mentally ill citizens is once again at the fore of public debate. The sideshow surrounding Spears and the tragedy of Northern Illinois are two sides of the same question: Should mentally ill people be confined and treated against their will? Should states invest more in mental health programs? Should mental patients have different rights than everybody else?

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Ben likes: Let's stop being nutty about the mentally ill

E. Fuller Torrey/City Journal

The emptying of our public psychiatric hospitals has been the second-largest social experiment in twentieth-century America, exceeded only by the New Deal. The experiment, undertaken upon remarkably little data and a multitude of flawed assumptions, has received virtually no formal evaluation or assessment to ascertain whether it has worked. Once the spring of deinstitutionalization was wound, it just kept going and going and going. And it continues today -- disastrously.

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Joel likes: Britney Spears versus her own civil liberties

Rosalie Greenberg/Huffington Post

In many states the laws regulating commitment to a psychiatric hospital requires that the individual is at a strong, fairly imminent risk of harming himself or others or to use a more popular phrase, is "a clear and present danger" to one's self or others. Perhaps to be even more direct, there has to be a very high suspicion that not placing a person in the hospital would result in suicidal or homicidal actions in the very near future. Consistent with our core beliefs as Americans, the law protects the rights of the individual, as it should be.

In the process of preserving one's basic rights, how far can we intervene to help preserve his or her very life?

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