Debate: Involuntary treatment - not whether, but when and what else is needed.

Involuntary treatment is a complex dialectic balancing self-autonomy and the individual's right to consent to treatment with society's duty to protect those suffering from severe mental illness who are at risk of causing harm to themselves or others. When necessary, involuntary treatment should provide evidence-based and medically justified care, with sufficient oversight and due process to protect the rights of patients. Clinically, the issue is not whether involuntary treatment should ever be used, but rather what other services are needed to enhance the quality of care within comprehensive community systems of care, thus limiting or preventing the need for involuntary interventions while also improving the outcomes of individuals affected by severe mental illness.

Global Health Impact: Human rights, access to medicines, and measurement.

Should people have a legal human right to health? And, if so, what exactly does protecting this right require? This essay defends some answers to these questions recently articulated in Global Health Impact. It explains how these answers depend on a particular way of thinking about health and the minimally good life, how quality of life matters at and over time, what various agents should do to help people who are unable to live well enough, and many other things. Moreover, it suggests some ways of improving common metrics for measuring and advancing our collective global health impact.

Understanding the Legal Rights and Mental Health Needs of Unaccompanied Immigrant Children in US Government Custody and Beyond.

This article addresses the mental health rights of unaccompanied children, the ways in which the US immigration system does not sufficiently support children's mental health, and how clinicians can play a role in meeting immigrant children's mental health needs.

Health Risks of Unaccompanied Immigrant Children in Federal Custody and in US Communities.

Unaccompanied immigrant children continue to arrive at the US-Mexico border and are at high risk for ongoing abuse, neglect, and poor mental and physical health. We are medical and legal experts in the fields of immigrant and refugee health, child abuse, and the legal rights of international refugee and migrant children. We provide an overview of US federal agencies with custody of unaccompanied immigrant children, a summary of medical care provided while in custody, and recent findings from the independent Juvenile Care Monitor Report mandating new custodial conditions for immigrant children while in federal custody. We provide recommendations to improve the health and well-being of unaccompanied immigrant children while in custody and once released to US sponsors. (Am J Public Health. 2024;114(3):340-346. https://doi.org/10.2105/AJPH.2023.307570).

From moral rights to legal rights? Lessons from healthcare contexts.

Many believe the existence of a moral right to some good should lead to recognition of a corresponding legal right to that good. If, for instance, there is a moral right to healthcare, it is natural to believe countries should recognize a legal right to healthcare. This article demonstrates that justifying legal rights to healthcare is more difficult than many assume. The existence of a moral right is insufficient to justify recognition of a corresponding justiciable constitutional right. Further conditions on when it is appropriate to recognize constitutional rights are rarely satisfied in the healthcare case. And focusing on aspirational or statutory rights presents costs for those seeking to justify legal rights on the basis of corresponding moral ones while maintaining empirical challenges for justifying constitutional rights. This suggests movement from a moral right to a corresponding legal one is far from straightforward and justifies examining alternative means of realizing moral socio-economic rights such as the proposed moral right to healthcare.

Stopping the Vicious Cycle: Equitable Enforcement Strategies to Achieve Safe, Stable, and Accessible Housing for People with Disabilities.

Policy Points People with disabilities experience a vicious cycle of poverty, poor health, and marginalization partly because of the inequitable implementation and enforcement of laws, including underenforcement of civil rights and housing laws and overenforcement of punitive nuisance and criminal laws. Inequitable enforcement reflects policy choices that prioritize powerful entities (e.g., landlords, developers) to the detriment of people who experience intersectional structural discrimination based on, for example, race, disability, and income. Equitable enforcement, a process of ensuring compliance with the law while considering and minimizing harms to marginalized people, can promote health and disability justice by increasing access to safe, stable, and accessible housing.

Estimating the value of democracy relative to other institutional and economic outcomes among citizens in Brazil, France, and the United States.

How much do citizens value democracy? How willing are they to sacrifice their liberties and voting rights for growth, equality, or other social outcomes? We design a conjoint experiment in nationally representative surveys in Brazil, France, and the United States in which respondents choose between different societies that randomly vary in their economic outcomes (country income, income inequality, social mobility), political outcomes (democracy, public health insurance), and the level of personal income for each respondent. Our research allows us to estimate the respondents' willingness to trade off democracy for individual income (as well as other societal attributes). We find that, on average, individuals are strongly attached to democracy and a robust welfare state. They prefer to live in a country without free democratic elections only if their individual income multiplies by at least three times and in a country without public health insurance only if their individual income more than doubles. After estimating these preferences at the individual level for all respondents, we show that, although there is an authoritarian minority in all three countries, forming a nondemocratic majority (by offering more income and/or other goods to respondents) is very unlikely. Our findings imply that, contrary to a growing discussion about the crisis of democracy, liberal democratic values remain substantially robust in high and middle income democracies.

Free Speech Challenges to the Inflation Reduction Act.

This Viewpoint looks at the lawsuits brought by pharmaceutical companies to challenge the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022, in particular claims under the First Amendment's protection of free speech.

Crime and victimization outcomes following civil rights limits to the use of compulsory treatment.

Community treatment orders (CTOs) have been associated with reduced crime/victimization-risk. Australia's ratification of the U.N. Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD) enabled patient-rights-advocacy to limit CTO-assignment to persons lacking decision-making-capacity. This effort was accompanied by a 15% reduction in CTO-utilization. Has this change affected crime/victimization-involvements of patients with schizophrenia-diagnoses? In Victoria Australia, the study considers crime/victimization-involvement among three patient-groups recruited with the same sampling-algorithm in the decade before (2000-2009, N = 14,711) and after (2010-2019, N = 10,702) CRPD-ratification. Each group is its own-control. Each group's positive-outcome across decades would be "no increase" in crime/victimization-involvement or in the ratio of the group's incident-rates to the State's. Following CRPD-ratification, first-hospitalized-patients with at least one CTO-assignment doubled their involvement in major crime-perpetrations (from 13% to 27%), non-CTO-hospitalized-patients almost doubled (from 10% to 18%), and 11% of outpatients were involved when none were before. Overall, a third (34%) were victimized-by-major-crime up from 28%, with 25% of outpatients experiencing victimization when none had before. Increases were most evident in major-crimes, led by assaults/abductions. Capacity-constraints on compulsory-treatment are associated with increases in crime/victimization-involvement, a transfer of responsibility for patients with schizophrenia-diagnoses from the mental-health-system to the criminal-justice-system, validation of dangerousness stereotypes, and growing negative family impact.

Looking within: Elevating Black scholarly contributions to empirical approaches in developmental science.

Over the past century, Black American scholars have designed, applied, and promoted conceptual frameworks and research models that propose nuanced understandings of psychological development. This article highlights examples of their contributions to understanding the differential impact of diverse contextual and situational factors. Through examinations of the psychological effects of Blackness on the development of cognition, competence, identity, and social functioning, Black psychologists outline pathways and provide tools for ecological culturally rooted methodologies. These multidisciplinary approaches run in contrast to dominant trends in the field and thus broaden developmental science's reach and influence. In the 1950s, developmental research by Black psychologists was instrumental to the fight for civil rights. Today, it continues to provide a basis for advancing diversity, equity, inclusion, and justice. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

Righting the historical record: Highlighting the significant contributions of Black psychologists in American schools.

The field of educational psychology, while closely aligned with several adjacent branches of psychology, focuses on teaching and learning processes in support of the development of students within K-16 environments and beyond. Similar to other fields, educational psychology has been historically dominated by theories and empirical studies developed and carried out by White scholars who presented racially and culturally biased ideologies that lacked Black perspectives. Couched within an Afrocentric and Critical Race Theory framework, the present article sets out to right the historical record by uplifting the voices of four prominent Black psychologists who played an important role in American schools and who have been largely ignored in the field of educational psychology. We review the works of Inez B. Prosser (1897-1934), A. Wade Boykin (1947-present), Barbara J. Robinson Shade (1933-present), and Asa Hilliard III-Baffour Amankwatia II (1933-2007). Each scholar has made significant impacts on American schools, ranging from pursuing innovative research topics and methodologies, providing expert testimony in landmark civil rights legislation, and leading college and university initiatives with generation-wide impacts on Black learners and communities. Based on the impact of the scholars highlighted in this article, we offer recommendations for the next steps in advancing the field toward a position of eradicating anti-Black racism and toward uplifting and centering the voices of Black learners. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

Saving unwanted children: a proposal for a National Rearing Institute.

Unwanted children are carried, born, and reluctantly raised each year; they are prone to abortion, abandonment, neglect, and abuse. Meanwhile, many developed societies are suffering from depopulation. To address these two issues concurrently, I propose that governments should grant pregnant women and mothers an irreversible and unconditional one-time chance to relinquish all their legal rights and obligations associated with each of their children under a specific age to a National Rearing Institute that adopts the children and rears them to the age when they can fully exercise their rights as adult citizens. I call this set of policy arrangements "Project New Republicans." This project aims to (1) protect and support the best interests of unwanted children, (2) maximize the health outcomes of the mothers who gave birth to these children and help the mothers to achieve self-realization, and (3) preserve an influx to the population from procreation against depopulation. The project is primarily grounded on both the utilitarian and intra- / inter-generational accounts of justice. It also ameliorates the oppression and domination of women by unjust social structures in alignment with the human rights-based approach.

Compulsory Psychotropic Medication in the California State Prison System.

In Washington v. Harper, the U.S. Supreme Court established that an administrative review conducted by prison staff was the minimum constitutionally appropriate due process for the administration of compulsory nonemergent antipsychotic medication. California's current process, Penal Code section 2602 (PC2602), uses a judicial review allowing for either emergent (medication beginning with application) or nonemergent routes. This article describes the history culminating with PC2602, beginning with the notion of civil death enacted in 1850, followed by the 1986 Keyhea injunction. Framed by problems that emerged, PC2602 was enacted in 2011, which is described from both legal-administrative and clinical perspectives.

Science and the legal rights of nature.

We review the use of science by lawmakers and courts in implementing or rejecting legal rights for nature in Ecuador, India, the United States, and other jurisdictions where some type of rights of nature have been recognized in the legal system. We then use the "right to evolve" to exemplify how interdisciplinary work can (i) help courts effectively define what this right might entail; (ii) inform how it might be applied in different circumstances; and (iii) provide a template for how scientists and legal scholars can generate the interdisciplinary scholarship necessary to understand and implement the growing body of rights-of-nature laws, and environmental law more generally. We conclude by pointing to what further research is needed to understand and effectively implement the growing body of rights-of-nature laws.