The mental patients' rights movement and mental health institutional change

Abstract

The mental patients' rights movement has added to the widespread critique of institutional psychiatry and provided leadership in opposing treatment methods such as electroshock, psychosurgery, and overdrugging, which are dangerous and regressive not only to patients, but to the expanded population of non-institutionalized persons as well. The movement has had some success in court cases for democratic rights, such as the right to treatment, the right to refuse treatment, patient labor, and commitment law. At the same time patients' rights demands have been partly coopted by mental health administrators. In a number to cases, mental health officials supported patients' rights litigation because it enabled them to speed up their deinstitutionalization programs. Overall, the conjuncture of the movement with economic impetus toward deinstitutionalization has allowed mental health planners to use the patients' rights issues to justify their essentially fiscal policy. Providers and administrators have set up advocacy offices, posted patients' bills of rights, and incorporated ex-patient representatives on advisory boards. Yet mental health administrators are generally opposed to a broad application of patients' rights.