Legal approaches to civil commitment in the United States and the United Kingdom are compared. A concise overview of the historical evolution of civil commitment in both countries precedes a discussion of the present scheme of commitment standards in each system. These current standards in U.S. and U.K. jurisdictions are then applied to a hypothetical case of delusional disorder. A discussion of the constructive use of civil commitment in patients with delusional disorder who may be dangerous focuses on its value as a preventive measure against potential harm to self or others, as well as the pros and cons of coercive assessment and treatment. Despite the many differences in approach to commitment, the authors concur that in both countries the patient with delusional disorder was committable before the commission of a serious criminal offense.
This chapter examines Irish fairy lore from the standpoint of ‘weird’ fiction. A subset of horror, fantasy and science fiction, weird fiction emphasises the chaotic nature of the universe and humanity’s precarious position within it, usually with reference to unfathomable scales of time and distance. The Book of Invasions, being the closest that Ireland has to a ‘creation’ myth, positions the Gaels as the last in a series of tribes to settle on the island, and the only fully human tribe in that series; the stories of the daoine sidhe, the original inhabitants of the country, complicate Ireland’s national history and imbue the very landscape with gruesome significance. The texts considered in this chapter all tap into this latent weirdness, whether by invoking the fairy-folk directly, through extrapolations of evolution, or via ruminations on antiquity and the Sublime.
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