The DSM-5 introduces dimensional, psychodynamic criteria for identifying healthy personalities and personality disorders.

Determining which patients are appropriate candidates for mandated substance-abuse treatment remains controversial and complicated.

Registries of those considered dangerous focus wrongly on those with mental illness, who account for only 4 percent of violent acts committed in the United States.

Mental health diversion programs show promise in effectively addressing the treatment needs of youth with mental health and substance use disorders who come in contact with the justice system.

When called to consult or to testify at “sexually violent predator” hearings, medical professionals’ primary task is adapting recognized medical terminology to the SVP label; they are asked to shoehorn medical diagnoses into ill-fitting legal language.

Movements to deinstitutionalize people with mental illness and to make institutionalization more legally difficult have resulted in a lack of space and resources for the care of those with severe mental illness, and many have ended up in jails and prisons.

The American Psychiatric Association proscribes its members from commenting on the mental health of public figures under its nonbinding “Goldwater Rule,” which followed a published survey of more than 1,000 psychiatrists commenting on Barry Goldwater’s emotional fitness for the presidency.

Incarcerated pregnant women are shackled while giving birth and routinely separated from their children immediately, which in many states leads to permanent termination of parental rights.

Breast pumping may make feeding with breast milk possible for more mothers, but it has done little to change the fundamental inequalities surrounding motherhood and infant care.

Clinicians' reluctance to engage in environmental interventions for children's psychiatric illnesses, which may seem to implicate parents, may stem from a desire to stand apart from mid-twentieth-century psychiatrists who blamed mothers for pediatric mental illness.