The Treatment of the Mentally

Abstract

EXCESSIVE safeguards against wrong certification exist inasmuch as a magistrate, who is unlikely to be instructed in mental illness, is included in those signing the document. In any event, although some 20,000 people are certified annually, it is very rare for genuine complaints of wrong certification to come to light. Most cases claiming it are in patients suffering from paranoid delusions of persecution. The few cases supported in the courts have been those of border-line mental deficiency (usually after some delinquency).