Recent mental health litigation: a critical perspective.

The author considers the effect of recent mental health litigation involving involuntary confinement, the right to refuse treatment, the least restrictive alternative, and the right to treatment on the role of the psychiatrist and the provision of mental health care. His thesis is that the implicit analogies between psychiatrists and agents of the criminal justice system and between patients and criminal defendants are misleading and that the recent changes in the law based on these analogies adversely affect the provision of mental health care.