Fear, prejudice, and neglect: Discrimination against mentally disabled persons.

Historically, the law has directly discriminated against mentally disabled persons and has failed to protect them from discrimination by private parties. Despite the arguments of the American Psychological Association and other mental health organizations, the Supreme Court has refused to consider state-sanctioned discrimination on the basis of mental disability as requiring a higher level of judicial scrutiny to ensure that it is related to important governmental objectives. Without such scrutiny, policy decisions based on prejudice and fear may jeopardize fair and humane treatment of mentally disabled persons in community and institutional settings. Such inadequate legal protection for mentally disabled persons heightens the significance of the professional responsibility of psychologists and other mental health professionals to promote respect for the personal autonomy of their clients and to strive to preserve their clients' constitutional rights of due process and equal protection under the law. To further legislative advocacy efforts on behalf of mentally disabled persons, an overview of existing federal antidiscrimination statutes is provided, along with a discussion of more recent legislation granting mentally disabled persons affirmative rights in a variety of contexts. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)