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Noncoercive Psychiatry: An Oxymoron

Reflections on Law, Liberty, and Psychiatry

Department of Psychiatry, State University of New York, 750 East Adams Street, Syracuse, NY 13210.

The practice of psychiatry rests on two pillars: mental illness and involuntary mental hospitalization. Each of these elements justifies and reinforces the other. Traditionally, psychiatric coercion was unidirectional, consisting of the forcible incarceration of the individual in an insane asylum. Today, it is bidirectional, the forcible eviction of the individual from the mental hospital (which has become his home) supplementing his prior forcible incarceration in it. So intimate are the connections between psychiatry and coercion that noncoercive psychiatry, like noncoercive slavery, is an oxymoron.

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