ABSTRACT
During the twentieth century, "the rights of mental patients" has been a popular topic in both the specialized literature of mental health and law, and in the popular press. Indeed, the subject has attracted the attention of even the United Nations, as an area in which human rights and ostensibly therapeutic practices are on a collision course. Rallying to the battle cry of "civil rights for mental patients," professional civil libertarians and the relatives of mental patients joined conventional psychiatrists demanding rights for mental patients, qua mental patients. One of the many ironies of the "mental patients' rights movement" is the way its rhetoric fits so perfectly the collectivistic-paternalistic spirit of traditional Oriental despotism and twentieth-century communism. Indeed, the Soviets—always a soft touch for the statist mentality that eagerly relinquishes real personal freedoms in return for fictitious legal rights—have joined the parade of giving persons defamed as mental patients rights, the better to justify taking away their liberties.
