Pandemic collided with Oregon's decades-old competency consent order, researchers find
A retrospective academic analysis published in the Journal of the American Academy of Psychiatry and the Law examined how the COVID-19 pandemic collided with Oregon's pre-existing Mink v. Brown consent judgment on competency-restoration timelines, looking at how pandemic-driven admission slowdowns strained a system that was already under court order to move faster, not slower.
The paper offered one of the more detailed academic accounts of how a public-health emergency interacted with a long-running institutional-reform lawsuit, a dynamic echoed in California's own COVID-era admission suspensions around the same period.
Source: COVID-19, Mink-Bowman, and Court-Ordered Psychiatric Services in Oregon — Journal of the American Academy of Psychiatry and the Law, by Thomas E. Hansen and Amela Blekic
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