The University of Chicago Law School Faculty Blog

Video: Mark Heyrman on Involuntary Commitment to Mental Hospitals

Back in November, we brought you a podcast of Clinical Professor of Law Mark Heyrman giving a Chicago's Best Ideas talk entitled "Why the Legal Standard for Involuntary Commitment to Mental Hospitals Doesn't Matter (Much)." Today, we present the video of that talk. This is the first round of what we hope will be a significant increase in our use of video on this blog.

Prefer to watch the video offline, or want to download it so you can watch it on an iPod or other portable media player? A Quicktime movie file is available here.

A Mark Heyrman Podcast: "Why the Legal Standard for Involuntary Commitment to Mental Hospitals Doesn't Matter (Much)"

Clinical Professor of Law Mark Heyrman delivered this lengthily titled CBI on November 6, 2007. His description of the talk is below:

"In the 1970's most states tightened their standards for involuntary commitment. During the past fifteen years the movement has been in the opposite direction--relaxing those standards. This talk will apply ideas developed by former Law School Dean Norval Morris to explore the effects (if any) these changes have had and will have on the number of persons involuntarily confined in psychiatric hospitals and why other institutional arrangements are substantially more important in explaining past and future fluctuations in the number of such commitments."