The Case of Sohrab Hassan: Assault on Liberty in the Texas Mental Health Courts

Since its inception, critical observers have expressed concern about psychiatry’s treatment of people who are labeled mentally ill. Some modern day observers express an even deeper concern, pointing out that coercive psychiatry destroys the hard-earned balance in U.S. law between the interests of social responsibility and group cohesion and those of individual freedom and liberty. More clearly and consistently than anyone, Thomas Szasz has delineated in great detail the fundamental problems that go with a fusion of psychiatry and the law, most notably that our country’s courts routinely and systematically violate the civil rights and liberty interests of those designated as mentally ill. This article tells the story of Sohrab Hassan, faced with a Texas effort to involuntarily commit him to 90 days of psychiatric incarceration and forced psychiatric drugging. The author uses the case to reveal the fundamental problems that Dr. Szasz’s life work describes. The essay also reveals an inspiring, partially successful defense of Hassan’s liberty interests in the face of psychiatric coercion