Dickinson Wright's Behavioral Health Care Group Writes Book for AHLA

Dickinson Wright PLLC is pleased to announce that Attorneys Greg Moore, Russell Kolsrud, Peter Domas, Serene Zeni, and Alexandra Hall wrote and edited The Fundamentals of Behavioral Health Care Law, which is now available through the American Health Lawyers Association.

With more than 50 years of combined experience, Dickinson Wright’s Behavioral Health Care lawyers continue to guide their clients through the complicated and exciting changes brought about by the Affordable Care Act. We have been and continue to be leaders in educating and counseling clients as parity and the integration of behavioral health and physical health take center stage.

Beginning in the mid-1950s, the approach to addressing serious behavioral health disorders began to shift from institutionalizing those afflicted to making community based outpatient treatment available. By 1970 community support programs began to appear with an emphasis on a fully continuous system of care that would serve the comprehensive needs of the seriously mentally ill. However, integrating behavioral and physical health requires that the applicable jurisprudence evolve at the same pace, and this faces resistance. Despite state legislatures’ policy decisions that persons with mental illness can live in our society as functioning individuals, our jurisprudence of tort and injury law is often an impediment to that goal.

The Fundamentals of Behavioral Health Care Law is the go-to reference for health care institutions, social service providers, and the lawyers who represent them, will serve as an introduction to the complex questions posed by behavioral health and the law.

Topics include:

• Change from institutionalization to community based outpatient system of care
• Legal duty owed by behavioral health providers to others
• Hindsight bias and its effect on behavioral health jurisprudence
• Criteria for when someone can be subjected to involuntary psychiatric treatment
• The impact of patient’s illness on the rules that govern treatment records
• Integration of behavioral health with physical medical issues
• Includes behavioral health terminology, acronyms, abbreviations, and a list of governmental entities involved in behavioral health
• State charts on civil commitment, duty to ward, and confidentiality of mental health records

To order your copy of The Fundamentals of Behavioral Health Care Law, please click here.

To learn more about Dickinson Wright’s Behavioral Health Care Practice, please click here.