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The Right to Refuse Psychiatric Medication

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2021

Daryl B. Matthews
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Extract

Robert Plotkin of the Mental Health Law Project called the case a “tremendous victory” for the patients’ rights movement. Alan Stone, President of the American Psychiatric Association, bemoaned it as “the most impossible, inappropriate, ill-considered judicial decision in the field of mental health law.” The case is Rogers v. Okin, and in deciding it, U.S. District Court Judge Joseph L. Tauro has gone farther than any previous court in establishing the right of hospitalized psychiatric patients to refuse medication.

The class action suit was filed in 1975 by a group of patients involuntarily committed to the Austin and May Units of the Boston State Hospital. It was brought against the Massachusetts Commissioner of Mental Health, now Dr. Robert Okin, and thirteen psychiatrists and a psychologist who were then on the staff of Boston State Hospital.

Type
Article
Information
Medicolegal News , Volume 8 , Issue 2 , April 1980 , pp. 4 - 16
Copyright
Copyright © American Society of Law, Medicine and Ethics 1980

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References

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