Wrongful involuntary commitment

Wrongful involuntary commitment or wrongful commitment refers to the unethical practice where mental health professionals wrongfully deem an individual to have symptoms of a mental disorder, and thereby commit the individual for treatment in a psychiatric hospital. In other words, it is involuntary commitment that is unjustified or illegal. It is interrelated with false imprisonment, medical malpractice, and medical error. Wrongful commitment is a primary component anti-psychiatry movement.
Wrongful involuntary commitment was first recognized in the United States 19th century. In 1851, physician Samuel A. Cartwright hypothesized that it was a mental illness that caused slaves to have the desire to run away, which he called drapetomania. In 1860, the case of Elizabeth Packard, who was wrongfully committed that year and filed a lawsuit and won thereafter, shed light on the immorality and illegality of wrongful involuntary commitment. In 1887, investigative journalist Nellie Bly went undercover at an asylum in New York City to expose the terrible conditions that mental patients at the time had to deal with. She published her findings and experiences as articles in New York World, and later made the articles into one book called Ten Days in a Mad-House. Her book was extremely successful and brought the egregious conditions of psychiatric healthcare at the time to the forefront.
The 20th century saw a few high-profile cases that were racist, sexist, and punished political dissenters by committing people unjustifiably. In 1927, demonstrator Aurora D'Angelo was involuntarily committed after participating in a rally in support of Sacco and Vanzetti. Throughout the 1940s and 1950s in Canada, 20,000 Canadian children, called the Duplessis orphans, were wrongfully certified as being mentally ill and as a result were wrongfully committed to psychiatric institutions where they were forced to take psychiatric medication that they did not need, and were abused. They were named after Maurice Duplessis, the premier of Quebec at the time, who deliberately committed these children to in order to misappropriate additional subsidies from the federal government. Decades later in the 1990s, several of the orphans sued Quebec and the Catholic Church for the abuse and wrongdoing. In 1958, black pastor and activist Clennon Washington King Jr. tried enrolling at the University of Mississippi, which at the time was white, for summer classes; the local police secretly arrested and involuntarily committed him to a mental hospital for 12 days.
In 1973, the Rosenhan experiment brought more attention to the conditions of modern psychiatric healthcare. The experiment was conducted by psychologist David Rosenhan as he questioned the validity of both psychiatric diagnoses and involuntary commitments; eight healthy associates feigned auditory hallucinations to gain admission to psychiatric hospitals. All eight people were admitted and diagnosed with psychiatric disorders. After being admitted, the patients acted normally and told staff that they were no longer experiencing hallucinations, but the patients were forced to admit to having a mental illness and agree to take medication they did not need in order to be released. The average hospital stay for all patients was 19 days.
Psychiatrists Peter Breggin and Thomas Szasz have been critical of psychiatric diagnosis, psychiatric medications, electroconvulsive therapy, and involuntary commitment. Szasz also founded the American Association for the Abolition of Involuntary Mental Hospitalization in 1970 and it was in operation for a decade before folding in 1980.
While patients are able to sue if they believe that they have been wrongfully committed, it is rare for hospitalized patients, who request that their case be reviewed by a court, to be released from their commitment. Typically the court sides with the psychiatrists. It is also known that at least a sizable number of people refuse to seek help due to their fear of being involuntarily committed, wrongfully or rightfully.
In 2010, Berkeley police officer Melissa Kelly abused California's 5150 involuntary psychiatric hold protocol by committing an unnamed person for no good reason.

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