Lawyering for the “Mad”: Social Organization and Legal Representation for Involuntary-Admission Cases in Poland

Abstract

This chapter shows how social relations embedded in legal and executive texts organize the everyday work of legal aid lawyers involved in involuntary admission cases. Because these cases tend to be relegated to the margins of lawyers' work, it will be argued that these features of the legal aid system determine how much effort lawyers put into them. When explained in a systematic way, law stories provide not only 'insights into how the legal workers and those affected by law make their choices, understand their actions, and experience the frustrations and satisfactions they entail' but also reveal institutional priorities that organize/restrain those choices and actions. I begin my discussion with an overview of the Polish Mental Health Act of 1994 concerning the regulation of involuntary admission and the procedural rights regime, with an emphasis on the right to representation. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2017 APA, all rights reserved)