ABSTRACT
Involuntary civil commitment, considers to be a necessary evil, is a deprivation of liberty for the purpose of protecting either the patient from self-destructive behavior or society from the patient. People offer some final thoughts about the causal epistemology of mental illness. The scale of the threat posed by homicide is far less than the scale of the threat posed by an infectious disease. The American Psychiatric Association published the Fifth Edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5) in 2013. Foremost among these is the Research Domain Criteria (RDoC) initiative that was undertaken by the National Institute of Mental Health, the world's largest funding agency for research in mental illness. In order for an RDoC approach to be applicable to civil commitment, the very definitions of consent, reality testing, suicidality, homicidality, and related constructs will need to be reduced to their most basic elements before they can be empirically evaluated.
