Care and treatment of the mentally ill in the United States: historical developments and reforms

Three major cycles of reform in public mental health care in the United States--the moral treatment, mental hygiene, and community mental health movements--are described as a basis for assessing the shifting boundaries between the mental health, social welfare, and criminal justice systems. Historical forces that led to the transinstitutionalization of the mentally ill from almshouses to the state mental hospitals in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries have now been reversed in the aftermath of recent deinstitutionalization policies. Evidence is suggestive that the mentally ill are also being caught up in the criminal justice system, a circumstance reminiscent of pre-asylum conditions in the early nineteenth century. These trends shape the current mental health service delivery system and the agenda for policy-relevant research on issues involving the legal and mental health fields.     

The quest for legitimacy in independent Kosovo: the unfulfilled promise of diversity and minority rights

When Kosovo declared its independence in 2008, it did so not as a nation-state, but as a “state of communities,” self-defining as multiethnic, diverse, and committed to extensive rights for minorities. In this paper, this choice is understood as a response to a dual legitimation problem. Kosovo experienced both an external legitimation challenge, regarding its contested statehood internationally, and an internal one, vis-à-vis its Serb minority. The focus on diversity and minority rights was expected to confer legitimacy on the state both externally and internally. International state-builders and the domestic political elite in post-conflict Kosovo both pursued this strategy. However, it inadvertently created an additional internal legitimation challenge, this time from within Kosovo’s majority Albanian population. This dynamic is illustrated by the opposition movement “Lëvizja Vetëvendosje” (Self-Determination Movement), which rejects the framing of Kosovo as first and foremost a multiethnic state. The movement’s counter-narrative represents an additional internal legitimation challenge to the new state. This paper thus finds that internationally endorsed “diversity management” through minority rights did not deliver as a panacea for the legitimacy dilemmas of the post-conflict polity. On the contrary, the “state of communities” continues to be contested by both majority and minority groups in Kosovo.