Involuntary commitment is bound to raise some apprehensions and there are serious questions about how it should be implemented, but there are horrible costs to the policy our society has been following.

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Since the 1960s in the United States, hundreds of thousands of patients with severe psychiatric disorders were discharged from public mental hospitals. At the same time, activists forced changes in commitment laws that made it impossible to treat...

On October 31, 1963, President John F. Kennedy signed into law the Community Mental Health Centers Act, through which psychiatric patients would be treated in small community clinics rather than in large expensive state hospitals. Though the act promised to improve conditions and save millions of dollars, it mostly added...

Panelists judged the effectiveness of the Community Mental Health Centers Act on October 31, 2003.