Overriding Mental Health Treatment Refusals: How Much Process Is “Due”?
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Saint Louis University Law Journal Volume 52 Number 2 (Winter 2008) Article 7 2008 Overriding Mental Health Treatment Refusals: How Much Process is “Due”? Samuel Jan Brakel Isaac Ray Forensic Group, LLC, [email protected] John M. Davis M.D. University of IL at Chicago, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarship.law.slu.edu/lj Part of the Law Commons Recommended Citation Samuel J. Brakel & John M. Davis M.D., Overriding Mental Health Treatment Refusals: How Much Process is “Due”?, 52 St. Louis U. L.J. (2008). Available at: https://scholarship.law.slu.edu/lj/vol52/iss2/7 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by Scholarship Commons. It has been accepted for inclusion in Saint Louis University Law Journal by an authorized editor of Scholarship Commons. For more information, please contact Susie Lee. SAINT LOUIS UNIVERSITY SCHOOL OF LAW OVERRIDING MENTAL HEALTH TREATMENT REFUSALS: HOW MUCH PROCESS IS “DUE”? SAMUEL JAN BRAKEL* and JOHN M. DAVIS, M.D.** ABSTRACT Getting mental health treatment to patients who need it is today a much belegaled enterprise. This is in part because lawmakers have a skewed view of the enterprise, in particular regarding the treatment of patients with antipsychotic medications. The properties and uses of these medications are misunderstood by many in the legal community, with the drugs’ undesirable side effects typically overstated and the remedial effects undersold when not outright ignored. One specific legal effect has been to accord to mental patients a substantively outsized right to refuse treatment that comes with a correspondingly action-stifling dose of procedural safeguards, this despite the patients’ frequent lack of capacity to exercise the right wisely and the bad personal and systemic consequences that flow from that. The purpose of this Article is to provide better balanced and accurate evidence of the properties of antipsychotic drugs so as to convince lawmakers and advocates for the mentally disabled that it is safe to roll back some of the more counterproductive legal strictures on the effort to provide mental health treatment. An analysis of selected cases and statutes is intended to illustrate that such a roll back can and should be applied to a variety of legal and institutional contexts. * Isaac Ray Forensic Group, LLC; Adjunct Professor of Law, DePaul University College of Law; J.D., 1968, University of Chicago; B.A., 1965, Davidson College. ** Gilman Professor of Psychiatry, University of Illinois, Chicago; M.D., 1960, Yale University; B.A., 1956, Princeton University. 501 SAINT LOUIS UNIVERSITY SCHOOL OF LAW 502 SAINT LOUIS UNIVERSITY LAW JOURNAL [Vol. 52:501 TABLE OF CONTENTS INTRODUCTION .............................................................................................. 502 I. OF TYPICALS AND ATYPICALS: THE OLD AND NEW MEDICAL DATA ........................................................................................ 506 II. ONCE AGAIN: WHAT IS THE LEGAL DEBATE ABOUT? ............................. 524 III. WHERE WERE WE IN 1991? .................................................................... 529 A. The Bad News in the Civil Commitment Context ........................ 531 B. Troublesome Criminal Competency Cases ................................. 541 C. Some Good News: Revised Judgments on Medicating the Restorable Accused and the Convicted ....................................... 545 IV. ZINERMON, RIGGINS, AND SELL: THE SUPREME COURT RETREATS? ....... 550 V. LEGISLATIVE PROCESS AND PROGRESS .................................................... 568 A. Increased Treatment Focus in Commitment Statutes ................. 571 1. Persistence of Dangerousness as the Sole Commitment Criterion and Four Deviations .............................................. 571 2. Secondary, Psychiatry-Focused Reforms ............................. 575 B. Outpatient “Commitment” Laws ................................................ 578 C. The ADA, Olmstead, and the “Conversion” Of Justice Kennedy ...................................................................................... 582 CONCLUSION .................................................................................................. 584 INTRODUCTION In 1991 we published an article in the Indiana Law Review entitled Taking Harms Seriously: Involuntary Mental Patients and the Right to Refuse Treatment.1 In it we argued that extending a legal right to refuse mental health treatment, at least in the sense of its being protected by potentially multiple judicial hearings, to involuntarily committed mental health patients was a legal and logical anomaly—one that had bad consequences for those patients who exercised the right, not to mention their fellow patients, the hospital doctors, and the institutions in which the patients were (ware)housed.2 We felt, somewhat naively perhaps, that the reason the law was askew stemmed from the lack of good medical information on the part of lawyers, judges, and legislators and that rectifying the situation required the presentation in an appropriate legal forum of such information.3 Everyone’s eyes would be opened and the law would change in the direction warranted by our confidence 1. Samuel Jan Brakel & John M. Davis, Taking Harms Seriously: Involuntary Mental Patients and the Right to Refuse Treatment, 25 IND. L. REV. 429 (1991). 2. Id. at 430 & n.6. 3. Id. at 437–41. SAINT LOUIS UNIVERSITY SCHOOL OF LAW 2008] OVERRIDING MENTAL HEALTH TREATMENT REFUSALS 503 in the medical facts—that the antipsychotic drugs predominantly used in treatment were highly efficacious and with nowhere near the negative side effect profiles portrayed by anti-psychiatric alarmists.4 There has been some success in the realization of this hope, though pinning much or any of it on the publication and dissemination of a legal academic article would be presumptuous.5 There has been progress in the law in the sense that the cases and statutes today are somewhat more likely than a decade or so ago to reflect an appropriate appreciation of what the medications can do, and what they will not do, in multiple contexts.6 Whether the issue is civil commitment and treatment (inpatient or outpatient), treatment in the criminal justice-mandated context of competency commitments (whether pretrial or pre- sentence), or post-conviction treatment in the prison setting, medical authority to medicate unwilling patients has expanded overall while judicial review has been relegated to a lesser and later “post-deprivation” role—a realignment of power that one would surmise has much to do with better knowledge of the large benefits versus relatively small costs in potential negative consequences of the medications.7 At the same time, however, there has been some jurisprudential backsliding as well, including at the U.S. Supreme Court, where a small number of decisions have been handed down and some language articulated that seems to give new life to what one had hoped was the moribund view of psychotropic drugs as predominantly harmful and the accompanying disbelief in the competence and integrity of doctors to appropriately prescribe them.8 Given the thus still uneven, not to say precarious, lay of the legal landscape on treatment refusals, we feel it is timely to do a reprise of sorts of our 1991 article and to present once again what we believe is a true picture of the risks and benefits of antipsychotic medications. It is a picture that in many respects is and can be more optimistic than before, consistent with another set of major advances over the last ten to fifteen years in psychiatric medicine, in particular, the development of the so-called atypicals, a new line of antipsychotic drugs with higher benefit potential and fewer risks than the “old” medications, and continuing improvement in their usage.9 4. Id. at 440–41. 5. Indeed, it would be demonstrably wrong: (1) what success there is has been slow in coming and uneven; (2) the article has not been cited with great frequency, its appeal apparently being limited mostly to the already converted; and (3) the achievement of significant legal change tends to require a combination of many factors and forces, among which academic writings may play a role but not usually a prominent one. 6. See infra Parts IV & V. 7. See infra Part III.C. 8. See infra Part IV. 9. See infra Part I. SAINT LOUIS UNIVERSITY SCHOOL OF LAW 504 SAINT LOUIS UNIVERSITY LAW JOURNAL [Vol. 52:501 Unlike last time when we avoided engaging the medication skeptics on their terms, this time around we will get into the legal arguments these skeptics are prone to advance. After all, most of the skeptics are lawyers and this is their game. Further, it is the law that rules what doctors can do, not their medical axioms, ethics, or habits. Also, whether an optimist by inclination or more of a realist, one can hardly hope to persuade the unpersuaded with “inconvenient” facts alone. The facts do matter, both qualitative and quantitative, but only in conjunction with a challenge to theoretical positions staked out and with an overt, that is, compensated for, appreciation of how readily the facts can be disregarded or manipulated by the theoretically pre- positioned and pre-disposed.10 Also unlike last time, when we limited our observations and conclusions to the civil commitment context leaving to implication the wider message that we knew was there, this time we are more willing to spell out the implications for other legal contexts. It comes with the territory of engaging