Outpatient commitment

A perhaps not very precise term, outpatient commitment refers to the practice of courts, while not ordering involuntary commitment, of requiring those it has found to be mentally ill to take medication or to comply with other restrictions. The courts will often specify that if the orders are not complied with, the person under court order will be subject to involuntary commitment.

In the last decade of the 20th century and the first of the 21st, there were "outpatient commitment" laws passed in a number of states in the USA and jurisdictions in Canada, in response to a small number of violent acts committed by people who had been diagnosed with mental illness, or the existing "outpatient commitment" laws were expanded. These laws were opposed by the anti-psychiatry and mad liberation[?] movements, often on the basis that the ordered drugs had (or were alleged to have) serious or unpleasant side-effects.