O’Connor v Donaldson (1975): Legal Challenges, Psychiatric Authority, and the Dangerousness Problem in Deinstitutionalization

Abstract

In 1975, the Supreme Court heard the case of O’Connor v Donaldson, in which Kenneth Donaldson disputed the decision of his psychiatrists at the Florida State Hospital to keep him incarcerated for 15 years for a mental illness, though he was not dangerous or receiving treatment. The Donaldson decision pitted activist attorneys against psychiatrists who were increasingly beleaguered in their efforts to assert expertise about mental illness in American society. This case and its context offer a window into the psychiatric and legal conversations within the deinstitutionalization movement. During a time when both psychiatry and the law were shifting in their professional claims and emphases, each side was captured by an idea of reform based on how they imagined the problems to be configured. Examining themes of place, authority, right to treatment, and dangerousness reveals the limitations of the reforms and the hardening of a narrative that limited state action to the elision of mental illness with dangerousness.