Court-Ordered Insanity: Interpretive Practice and Involuntary Commitment, Volume 757In preparation for his new study, Dr. Holstein observed several hundred commitment hearings in five widely separated jurisdictions. He then undertook a description of the interpretive practice under which the courts determined whether or not "candidate patients" should be committed against their will to institutions for the mentally ill. He has approached these hearings as a conversational analyst, examining the interaction among judges, lawyers, psychiatrists, and the patients themselves. He argues that decisions to commit are products of those conversations, that the ways in which patients are identified and responded to as concrete instances of "deviance" or "social problems" are constituted through such dialogue. (The book appends some useful transcripts of the actual hearings to illustrate its points.). Holstein's book is also concerned with social organization and culture. He shows how legal interpretation at these hearings takes place within socially organized circumstances, and consequently is responsive to diverse contextual factors, fraught with collective representations and cultural images that serve as further interpretive resources for participants. Court-Ordered Insanity addresses some serious questions: How do competence and incompetence emerge through the hearings? How do considerations about the patient's social status figure into the discussions? How do the actors' assumptions about mental illness shape what occurs? Thanks in part to the clarity and force of Holstein's presentation, the reader comes to recognize that much of the earlier sociological work on mental illness may have focused on the wrong issues. |
Contents
| 1 | |
Analyzing Involuntary Commitment | 19 |
Outlook | 41 |
Psychiatry and the | 54 |
The Sequential Organization of Commitment | 59 |
35733 | 63 |
19 | 71 |
Organizing the Patients Rebuttal | 77 |
Incompetence Normalcy and Conversational | 110 |
Interpretive Practice | 149 |
Matching | 161 |
Description Rhetoric and Argumentation | 169 |
Appendices | 191 |
54 | 192 |
110 | 194 |
References | 209 |
Attorneys Comments and Summations | 83 |
The Conversational Organization of Competence | 93 |
Organizing Incompetence | 100 |
Mental Illness Assumptions | 212 |
Index | 217 |
Other editions - View all
Court-ordered Insanity: Interpretive Practice and Involuntary Commitment James A. Holstein No preview available - 1993 |
Court-ordered Insanity: Interpretive Practice and Involuntary ..., Volume 757 James A. Holstein No preview available - 1993 |
Common terms and phrases
African American Andro Arcelli argued articulate asked assumption behavior bipolar disorder Brown candidate patients cern circumstances claims client Cline clothing commitment arguments commitment decisions commitment hearings commitment proceedings commonsense competence concerns context conversational court personnel courtroom crazy talk cross-examination cultural deinstitutionalized delusional depictions descriptions diagnosis discourse disorder display disturbed doctor Donner's everyday example gender grave disability Gubrium hearing participants Holstein home and family hospital inappropriate incompetence interactional interpretive practice invoked involuntary commitment judge labeling labeling theory living arrangements living situation Melvin Jackson ment mental health mental illness Metropolitan Court mitment mother normal Northern Court noted organizational orientation PD's persons Polly Brown portrayed problems procedures proposed living psychiatric condition psychiatrist questions rational release relevant responses rhetorical routinely Scheff sequence shelter silence social symptoms tenability testified testimony Thierren things tion treatment trouble typically witness
Popular passages
Page 11 - I mean, rather, that social groups create deviance by making the rules whose infraction constitutes deviance, and by applying those rules to particular people and labeling them as outsiders. From this point of view, deviance is not a quality of the act the person commits, but rather a consequence of the application by others of rules and sanctions to an "offender.
Page xvi - Chicago in 1962, also reports a strong presumption of illness by the staff of the Cook County Mental Health Clinic: Certificates are signed as a matter of course by staff physicians after little or no examination . . . The so-called examinations...
Page 16 - constituted by all that was said, in all the statements that named it, divided it up, described it, explained it, traced its development, indicated its various correlations, judged it, and possibly gave it speech by articulating, in its name, discourses that were to be taken as its own
Page 1 - We have yet to write the history of that other form of madness, by which men, in an act of sovereign reason, confine their neighbors, and communicate and recognize each other through the merciless language of non-madness...
Page 16 - ... mental illness was constituted by all that was said in all the statements that named it, divided it up, described it, explained it, traced its developments, indicated its various correlations, judged it, and possibly gave it speech by articulating, in its name, discourses that were to be taken as its own.
Page xvi - ... on an assemblyline basis, often being completed in two or three minutes, and never taking more than ten minutes. Although psychiatrists agree that it is practically impossible to determine a person's sanity on the basis of such a short and hurried interview, the doctors recommend confinement in 77% of the cases. It appears in practice that the alleged-mentally-ill is presumed to be insane and bears the burden of proving his sanity in the few minutes allotted to him . . ." These citations suggest...
Page 20 - Whereas there are distracted persons in some towns that are unruly, whereby not only the families wherein they are, but others suffer much damage by them, it is ordered by this Court...
Page 8 - After exhausting these categories, however, there is always a residue of the most diverse kinds of violations, for which the culture provides no explicit label.
Page 16 - I soon realised that the unity of the object 'madness' does not enable one to individualise a group of statements. ... There are two reasons for this. It would certainly be a mistake to try to discover what could have been said of madness at a particular time by interrogating the being of madness itself, its secret content, its silent, self-enclosed truth.