[Legal aspects of the psychiatric treatment of minors].

This article deals with the involvement of the law in the psychiatric treatment of minors through the directives it gives with regards to examination, diagnosis, treatment and hospitalization of minors. In recent years changes have been made in the law dealing with these issues. These were set out in the 1995 amendments to two laws: "The Law of the Treatment and Supervision of Minors" and "the Law of the Treatment of the Mentally Ill". The amendments include changes in the procedural processes as well as the introduction of concepts which did not exist in the previous laws. Since these amendments have begun to be put into practice, the therapeutic system has discovered that problems have arisen in two areas--the conceptual and the practical--of the instructions of the new laws. These problems arise out of the difficulty in understanding what the laws actually say, difficulties in executing the laws, and a special clumsiness which causes it to miss its objective through the insistence on systems of control the likes of which are not found in any other branch of medicine. This article will discuss the above-mentioned amendments to the law with two aims in mind: to present an overview and clarification of a complex and complicated law with which a large part of the public is not competently apprised; and to present the limitations of this law and our comments about it.