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15.2: Patient’s Rights

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  • Page ID
    161501

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    Learning Objectives
    • Describe rights patients with mental illness have and identify key court cases.

    The following are several rights that patients with mental illness have. They include:

    • Right to Treatment – In the 1966 case of Rouse v. Cameron, the D.C. District court said that the right to treatment is a constitutional right, and failure to provide resources cannot be justified due to insufficient resources. In the 1972 case of Wyatt v. Stickney, a federal court ruled that the state of Alabama was constitutionally obligated to provide all people who were committed to institutions with adequate treatment and had to offer more therapists, privacy, exercise, social interactions, and better living conditions for patients. In the case of O’Connor v. Donaldson (1975), the court ruled that patient’s cases had to be reviewed periodically to see if they could be released. As well, if they are not a danger and are able to survive on their own or with help from family or friends, that they be released.
    • Right to Refuse Treatment – As patients have the right to request treatment, they too have the right to refuse treatment such as biological treatment, psychotropic medications (Riggins v. Nevada, 1992), and electroconvulsive therapy.
    • Right to Less Restrictive Treatment – In Dixon v. Weinberger (1975), a U.S. District Court ruled that individuals have a right to receive treatment in facilities less restrictive than mental institutions. The only patients who can be committed to hospitals are those unable to care for themselves.
    • Right to Live in a Community – The 1974 U.S. District Court case, Staff v. Miller, ruled that state mental hospital patients had a right to live in adult homes in their communities.

    Key Takeaways

    You should have learned the following in this section:

    • Patients with a mental illness have a right to treatment, to refuse treatment, to have less restrictive treatment, and to live in a community.
    Review Questions
    1. What rights do patients with mental illness have and what court cases were pivotal to their establishment?

    This page titled 15.2: Patient’s Rights is shared under a CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 license and was authored, remixed, and/or curated by Alexis Bridley and Lee W. Daffin Jr. via source content that was edited to the style and standards of the LibreTexts platform; a detailed edit history is available upon request.