Comparison of the Judicialization Process in the French and the U.S. Psychiatric Systems

The birth of psychiatry is inextricably linked to the transformation of the legal and judicial regulation of the coercion and restriction of freedom to treat deviant people. The repartition of powers between judges and doctors is one of the main issues in the transformation of psychiatry since the 19th century. However the role and timing for justice and judicial power in mental health treatments may vary from one context to another, geographically, and across time. The paper aims to analyze the place of judges in the regulation of involuntary psychiatric commitment in two different national contexts: France and the United States. This study pursues two main purposes: first, we contribute to the growing reflection about medical and judicial powers as two different, yet connected management systems for deviance and vulnerability; second, this analysis of two different articulations of civil rights and welfare aims to participate in the comparison in the two countries. This study is based on a research on the systems of management of mental illnesses in France and the United States obtained by the authors over several years of work in this field. This initial knowledge is supplemented by surveys carried out in France and the United States on certain judicial care systems: Assisted Outpatient Treatment and civil commitment hospitalizations in the State of New York between 2014 and 2016 and the setting up of an automatic control of the judge of involuntary hospitalizations in France, since 2011.