In the 1970s, activist attorneys took on what they saw as a major issue in American society – the authority of psychiatrists to lock up hundreds of thousands of people against their will in state psychiatric hospitals in violation of their civil liberties. After a series of legal challenges to psychiatric power, states constructed mental health codes to limit involuntary psychiatric hospital admissions to a much smaller population of individuals at imminent risk to harm themselves or others. Decades later, issues of psychiatric authority with regard to social dilemmas arose again, but this time with the expectation that psychiatric expertise could help solve the contemporary problem of gun violence. This paper examines the history of the intersection between psychiatry and social problems, especially dangerousness, and the fears and expectations that have accompanied impressions of psychiatric expertise and authority.
AlexanderM (2020) The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness. New Press.
2.
American Civil Liberties Union (2025) ACLU Condemns Trump Executive Order Targeting Disabled and Unhoused People. American Civil Liberties Union.
3.
American Psychiatric Association (2013) Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. American Psychiatric Publishing.
4.
AndersonC (2021) The Second: Race and Guns in a Fatally Unequal America. Bloomsbury Publishing.
5.
AppelbaumPS (1994) Almost a Revolution: Mental Health Law and the Limits of Change. Oxford University Press.
6.
BazelonDL (1974) Psychiatrists and the adversary process. Scientific American230: 18–23.
7.
BurtVBermanRRasminskyS (2022) Sorry, but mental health professionals are not clairvoyant. Washington Post, 3June.
8.
CahalanS (2019) The Great Pretender. Grand Central Publishing.
9.
CarlatDJ (2010) Unhinged: The Trouble with Psychiatry – A Doctor’s Revelations About a Profession in Crisis. Free Press.
10.
CarlsonJ (2020) Policing the Second Amendment: Guns, Law Enforcement, and the Politics of Race. Princeton University Press.
11.
CartyLA (1992) The mental health law project’s 20 years. Clearinghouse Review26: 57–65.
12.
CochraneEKanno-YoungsZ (2022) Biden signs gun bill into law, ending years of stalemate. New York Times, 25June.
13.
CocozzaJJSteadmanHJ (1978) Prediction in psychiatry: An example of misplaced confidence in experts. Social Problems25: 265–276.
14.
CohenICohenNLSadoffRL (1975) Right to treatment. Bulletin of the American Academy of Psychiatry and the Law3: 59–65.
15.
CohenMB (2004) Voices from an invisible movement: Mental health consumer/survivor/ex-patient activism. Reflections: Narratives of Professional Helping10(4): 50–61.
16.
ConcemiM (1975) Constitutional law – Simple custodial confinement of civilly committed nondangerous mentally ill violates constitutional right to freedom. Suffolk University Law Review10: 76–99.
17.
DeckerHS (2013) The Making of DSM-III: A Diagnostic Manual’s Conquest of American Psychiatry. Oxford University Press.
18.
DershowitzAM (1968) Psychiatry in the legal process: A knife that cuts both ways. Judicature51: 370–377.
19.
DershowitzAM (1974) Dangerousness as a criterion for confinement. Bulletin of the American Academy of Psychiatry and the Law2: 172–179.
20.
DeutschA (1948) The Shame of the States. Harcourt Brace.
21.
Editorial Board (2022) How the highland park gunman slipped through the cracks. Washington Post, 9July.
22.
EngelGL (1977) The need for a new medical model: A challenge for biomedicine. Science196: 129–136.
23.
EnnisBJ (1972) Prisoners of Psychiatry: Mental Patients, Psychiatrists, and the Law. Harcourt Brace Javanovich.
24.
EnnisBJ (1974) Emerging legal rights for the mentally handicapped. Bulletin of the American Academy of Psychiatry and the Law2: 185–193.
25.
EnnisBJFriedmanPR (eds) (1973) Legal Rights of the Mentally Handicapped. Practicing Law Institute.
26.
EnnisBJSiegelL (1973) The Rights of Mental Patients: The Basic ACLU Guide to a Mental Patient’s Rights. Avon Books.
27.
FelthousARSwansonJ (2017) Prohibition of persons with mental illness from gun ownership under Tyler. Journal of the American Academy of Psychiatry and the Law45: 478–484.
28.
FieldsJD (1976) O’Connor v. Donaldson. Hofstra Law Review4: 511–530.
29.
FishbeinL (1979) The Snake Pit (1948): The sexist nature of sanity. American Quarterly31: 641–665.
30.
FrancesA (2013) Saving Normal: An Insider’s Revolt Against Out-of-Control Psychiatric Diagnosis, DSM-5, Big Pharma, and the Medicalization of Ordinary Life. HarperCollins.
31.
FreedmanD (2001) False prediction of future dangerousness: Error rates and psychopathy checklist – Revised. Journal of the American Academy of Psychiatry and the Law29: 89–95.
32.
FriedanB (1963) The Feminine Mystique. Dell Publishing.
33.
GermanJR (1975) Involuntary treatment – Its legal limitations. Bulletin of the American Academy of Psychiatry and the Law3: 66–69.
34.
GillonSM (2018) Separate and Unequal: The Kerner Commission and the Unraveling of American Liberalism. Basic Books.
35.
GriffithEEH (2023) Race and Excellence: My Dialogue with Chester Pierce. American Psychiatric Publishing.
36.
GrobGN (1983) Mental Illness and American Society, 1875–1940. Princeton University Press.
37.
GrobGN (1991) From Asylum to Community: Mental Health Policy in Modern America. Princeton University Press.
38.
GrobGN (1994) The Mad Among Us: A History of the Care of America’s Mentally Ill. Harvard University Press.
39.
GrobGN (2011) The attack of psychiatric legitimacy in the 1960s: Rhetoric and reality. Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences47: 398–416.
40.
GrobGNGoldmanHH (2006) The Dilemma of Federal Mental Health Policy: Radical Reform or Incremental Change?Rutgers University Press.
41.
Group for the Advancement of Psychiatry (1966) Laws Governing Hospitalization of the Mentally Ill. Group for the Advancement of Psychiatry.
42.
Haider-MarkelDPJoslynMR (2001) Gun policy, opinion, tragedy, and blame attribution: The conditional influence of issue frames. Journal of Politics63: 520–543.
43.
HaleNGJr (1995) The Rise and Crisis of Psychoanalysis in the United States: Freud and the Americans, 1917–1985. Oxford University Press.
44.
HarringtonA (2019) Mind Fixers: Psychiatry’s Troubled Search for the Biology of Mental Illness. W.W. Norton & Company.
45.
HealyD (2002) The Creation of Psychopharmacology. Harvard University Press.
46.
HenningK (2021) The Rage of Innocence: How America Criminalizes Black Youth. Pantheon Books.
47.
HermanE (1995) The Romance of American Psychology: Political Culture in the Age of Experts. University of California Press.
48.
HintonE (2016) From the War on Poverty to the War on Crime: The Making of Mass Incarceration in America. Harvard University Press.
49.
HintonE (2021) America on Fire: The Untold History of Police Violence and Black Rebellion Since the 1960s. Liveright Publishing Corporation.
50.
HorwitzAV (2002) Creating Mental Illness. University of Chicago Press.
51.
HustedJRNehemkisA (1995) Civil commitment viewed from three perspectives: Professional, family, and police. Bulletin of the American Academy of Psychiatry and the Law23: 533–546.
52.
JonesKW (2009) The thirty-third victim: Representations of Seung Hui Cho in the aftermath of the ‘Virginia Tech Massacre’. Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth2: 64–82.
53.
KaufmanMS (1988) “Crazy” until proven innocent – Civil commitment of the mentally ill homeless. Columbia Human Rights Law Review19: 333–368.
54.
KeseyK (1962) One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. Viking Press.
55.
LeongGB (2008) Revisiting the politics of dangerousness. Journal of the American Academy of Psychiatry and the Law36: 278–281.
56.
LewisKOlverMEWongSCP (2012) The violence risk scale: Predictive validity and linking changes in risk with violent recidivism in a sample of high-risk offenders with psychopathic traits. Assessment20: 150–164.
57.
LindmanFTMcIntyreDMJr (eds) (1961) The Mentally Disabled and the Law: The Report of the American Bar Foundation on the Rights of the Mentally Ill. University of Chicago Press.
58.
LivermoreJMMalmquistCPMeehlPE (1968) On the justifications for civil commitment. University of Pennsylvania Law Review117: 75–96.
59.
McLeanA (1995) Empowerment and the psychiatric consumer/ex-patient movement in the United States: Contradictions, crisis and change. Social Science in Medicine40: 1053–1071.
60.
MetzlJM (2019) Dying of Whiteness: How the Politics of Racial Resentment Is Killing America’s Heartland. Basic Books.
61.
MullerMJ (1975) O’Connor v. Donaldson: Right to liberty for the nondangerous mentally ill. Ohio Northern University Law Review3: 550–562.
62.
ParsonsAE (2018) From Asylum to Prison: Deinstitutionalization and the Rise of Mass Incarceration After 1945. University of North Carolina Press.
63.
PierceCM (1962) Psychiatric aspects of police-community relations. Mental Hygiene46: 107–115.
64.
PinalsDA (2021) Violence risk assessment in clinical settings: Enduring challenges and evolving lessons. Harvard Review of Psychiatry29: 90–93.
65.
PlantRJ (2005) William Menninger and American psychoanalysis, 1946–48. History of Psychiatry16: 181–202.
66.
PollackS (1974) The president’s message. Bulletin of the American Academy of Psychiatry and the Law2: vi–vii.
67.
RazM (2013) What’s Wrong with the Poor? Psychiatry, Race, and the War on Poverty. University of North Carolina Press.
68.
RennieTAC (1955) Social psychiatry – A definition. International Journal of Social Psychiatry1: 5–13.
69.
RothmanDJ (1971) The Discovery of the Asylum: Social Order and Disorder in the New Republic. Little, Brown and Company.
70.
ScullAT (1977) Madness and segregative control: The rise of the insane asylum. Social Problems24: 337–351.
71.
SimpsonJR (2021) The need for systematic training on gun rights and mental illness for forensic psychiatrists. Journal of the American Academy of Psychiatry and the Law49: 38–41.
72.
SinghJPDesmaraisSLVan DornRA (2013) Measurement of predictive validity in violence risk assessment studies: A second-order systematic review. Behavioral Sciences and the Law31: 55–73.
73.
SlovenkoR (1964) The psychiatric patient, liberty, and the law. American Journal of Psychiatry121: 534–548.
74.
SmithJSpieglerJ (2020) Explaining gun deaths: Gun control, mental illness, and policymaking in the American States. Policy Studies Journal48: 235–256.
75.
SmithM (2023) The First Resort: The History of Social Psychiatry in the United States. Columbia University Press.
76.
SpitzerRJ (2021) The Politics of Gun Control. Routledge.
77.
StaubME (2011) Madness Is Civilization: When the Diagnosis Was Social, 1948–1980. University of Chicago Press.
78.
SzaszT (1961) The Myth of Mental Illness: Foundations of a Theory of Personal Conduct. Hoeber–Harper.
79.
TomesN (2006) The patient as a policy factor: A historical case study of the consumer/survivor movement in mental health. Health Affairs25: 720–729.
80.
TragerEP (2020) Mental illness, the second amendment and gun violence. Crosscurrents70: 406–414.
81.
TrotterRJ (1975) Open sesame: The constitution and mental institutions. Science News108: 30–31.
82.
WalkerS (1990) In Defense of American Liberties: A History of the ACLU. Southern Illinois University Press.
83.
WhitakerRCosgroveL (2015) Psychiatry Under the Influence: Institutional Corruption, Social Injury, and Prescriptions for Reform. Palgrave Macmillan.
84.
WilkersonI (2020) Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents. Random House.
85.
WongSCPGordonA (2006) The validity and reliability of the violence risk scale. Psychology, Public Policy, and Law12: 279–309.
86.
WootsonCRJrSotomayorM (2022) Biden signs gun-control legislation into law. Washington Post, 25June.
