Douglas A. Smith

About the author: Douglas A. Smith is an activist who works to end what he perceives as the abuse perpetrated by psychiatry and the laws regulating its practice .

Many states have enacted outpatient commitment laws whereby people who refuse to comply with an outpatient mental health treatment program can be involuntarily committed to a psychiatric hospital. On the one hand, these new laws change very little because psychiatrists have always had the power to incarcerate people if they allege that a patient has a mental illness and is dangerous. On the other hand, the enactment of such laws perpetuates some dangerous myths. The first of these myths is that mental illnesses are real illnesses with biological causes that can be corrected by psychiatric drugs. In fact, "mental illness" is not a real disease, and psychiatry...