This volume developed from and around a series of six lectures sponsored
by Rice University and the University of Texas Medical Branch at
Galveston in the Fall of 1976. Though these lectures on the concepts of
mental health, mental illness and personal responsibility, and the
social treatment of the mentally ill were given to general audiences in
Houston and Galveston, they were revised and expanded to produce six
extensive formal essays by Dan Brock, Jules Coleman, Joseph Margolis,
Michael Moore, Jerome Neu, and Rolf Sartorius. The five remaining
contributions by Daniel Creson, Corinna Delkeskamp, Edmund Erde, James
Speer, and Stephen Wear were in various ways engendered by the debates
occasioned by the original six lectures. In fact, the majority of the
last five contributions emerged from informal dis- cussions occasioned
by the original lecture series. The result is an interlocking set of
essays that address the law and public policy insofar as they bear on
the treatment of the mentally ill, special atten- tion being given to
the defmition of mental illness, generally and in the law, to the issues
of the bearing of mental incompetence in cases of criminal and civil
liability, and to the issue of involuntary commitment for the purpose of
treatment or for institutional care. There is as well a critical defense
of Thomas Szasz's radical proposal that mental illnesses are best
understood as problems in living, not as diseases.
