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Recent Case Developments in Health Law: Mental Illness and the Right to Refuse

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2021

Brett Hartman
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Extract

In January 2009, the California Court of Appeal for the Fifth District held that an individual suffering from paranoid schizophrenia could be forcefed and medicated despite his refusal of consent. The patient was a prison inmate, who engaged in a hunger strike to protest imagined abuses by prison guards. The court, reconciling conflicting provisions of California law, upheld the appointment of a conservator to make treatment decisions because the patient could not participate in those decisions “by means of a rational thought process.” However, in tying mental capacity to the plausibility of a protestor’s claims, the court risks placing political dissent at the mercy of judicial discretion.

Type
JLME Column
Information
Journal of Law, Medicine & Ethics , Volume 37 , Issue 2 , Summer 2009 , pp. 380 - 388
Copyright
Copyright © American Society of Law, Medicine and Ethics 2009

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