Book Review: Mental Health Law: Canadian Mental Health Law and Policy: Second Edition
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Mental Health Law Canadian Mental Health Law and Policy: Second Edition John E Gray, Margaret A Shone, Peter F Liddle. Markham (ON): LexisNexis Canada Ine; 2008. 490 p. Can$ 165.00 Reviewer rating: Good This book is the second edition of a book that was highly regarded when first published in 2000. It is a comprehensive review and analysis of mental health legislation in Canada updated to reflect the many changes that have occurred in the intervening years. All the major issues in the framing of mental health legislation are discussed, and for the most part it is balanced and dispassionate, in an area that has been prone to much polarization and political wrangling. This book deals with all aspects of the law and mental disorder. It is comprehensive and scholarly, with copious references and appendices. The 3 authors are, respectively, a psychologist with experience in hospital management, a lawyer with long experience in mental health law, and a psychiatrist with forensic experience and much practical clinical knowledge. The first 4 chapters describe the current mental health legislation in Canada with its recent history and the psychiatric classification of mental disorders and their modern treatment - all primarily from a legal perspective. The next 5 chapters discuss issues that have been controversial in the past 5 decades, and that successive revisions to the legislation have tried to address. These include criteria and procedures for involuntary admission, psychiatric treatment authorization and refusal including consent and capacity, assisted community treatment, and rights and safeguards for patients, including those contained in the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. Chapter 1 0 discusses mandated services and attempts to develop Comprehensive Mental Health Legislation (CMHL) on a national level. Chapter 1 1 discusses mental disorder and the Criminal Code of Canada. Chapter 12 sums up the arguments made earlier and makes recommendations for a national approach to CMHL. They assert that there is at least some level of agreement about criteria for involuntary admission, rights, and safeguards for patients, and increasing recognition of the need for assertive community treatment. Areas of disagreement include the authorization of treatment in people who meet the criteria for involuntary admission but give competent refusal to all treatment. This is an issue that has remained very controversial and which different jurisdictions in Canada have handled differently. The civil libertarian view is that imposing treatment on an involuntary patient who does not or cannot give consent is an abuse of human rights. There have been several well-known court cases on this issue. Often the courts have decided in favour of authorizing treatment but sometimes they have not. In either case, the protracted process has meant that these people remain incarcerated for long periods without the treatment that would shorten their period of illness. …
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.005 | 0.011 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.120 | 0.048 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".