High court ruling must avoid encouraging involuntary commitment
Giving mental health patients access to outpatient care and reserving involuntary commitments for situations that warrant them is crucial to patient safety because studies show that involuntarily commitments result in patients refusing help for fear their civil rights will be taken away.
State laws over decades have evolved to support physicians in striking that balance. Now a plaintiff is asking Pennsylvania's highest court to interpret a commonwealth law in a way that would ultimately force physicians who feared being sued to err on the side of providing involuntarily treatments for patients to whom they otherwise would have provided voluntarily outpatient care.
The Litigation Center of the American Medical Association and State Medical Societies in December joined the Pennsylvania Medical Society and the Pennsylvania Psychiatric Society in filing an amicus brief in the matter. The brief asks the Supreme Court of Pennsylvania to uphold an appellate court decision that does not open physicians up to a new liability when they are making treatment decisions involving mental health patients.
"Overall, studies have shown that 77% of previously admitted patients will not risk being institutionalized again, even if they know they pose a danger to themselves or others. Creating a liability system that would incentivize involuntary commitment, which a liability ruling here would do, would have larger repercussions," the brief tells the court in the case, Leight v. University of Pittsburgh Physicians, et al.
A ruling opening up doctors to new liability would result in physicians involuntarily committing more patients out of fear of lawsuits. That would not improve mental health care, the brief states, and would raise costs while creating greater risks for patients and the public as a whole. One in five adults experiences a mental illness at some point, and one in 25 is living with a serious mental illness.
