Acknowledgments -- Introduction --
1. Interpretive Practice and Involuntary Commitment -- Perspectives on Mental Illness -- Reality as an Interactional Accomplishment -- The Labeling Controversy -- Constitutive Analysis -- Studying Interpretive Practice -- Notes --
2. Analyzing Involuntary Commitment -- A History of Involuntary Commitment -- Contemporary Involuntary Commitment Laws -- Research Settings -- Commitment Hearings in Brief -- Methodological Approach -- Notes --
3. Decision-Making in Context: Outlook and Orientations -- Contingent Factors and Commitment Decisions -- Background Assumptions and Orientations -- Psychiatry and the Law -- Danger or Disability? -- Notes --
4. The Sequential Organization of Commitment Hearings -- Delimiting Legal Proceedings: The Summons -- Producing Psychiatric Assessments -- Organizing the Patient's Rebuttal -- Attorneys' Comments and Summations -- Resolution -- Interpretive Issues for Involuntary Commitment -- Notes --
5. The Conversational Organization of Competence and Incompetence -- Interactional Competence and Crazy Talk -- Organizing Interactional Competence -- Organizing Incompetence -- Incompetence, Normalcy, and Conversational Practice -- Notes --
6. Troubles, Tenability, and the Placement of Insanity -- Tenability and Troubles -- Managing Basic Necessities -- The Presence of Competent Caretakers -- Cooperation with a Treatment Regime -- Placing Insanity: Matching Needs to -- Accommodations -- Accomplishing Tenability -- Tenability and Accountability -- Notes --
7. Mental Illness Assumptions -- Mental Illness Assumptions as Interpretive Schemes -- Mental Illness and Credibility -- Contextualizing Patients' Performance -- Suspending the Assumption -- Tenability and Mental Illness -- Notes --
8. Constructing Tenability: Interpretive Practice in Cultural Context -- Producing People -- Using Normal Forms -- Accomplishing Accommodations: Matching People with Places -- Description, Rhetoric, and Argumentation -- Notes --
9. Action That Divides -- Mental Illness and Community Custody -- Accountability Structures -- Rationalizing Compassion, Domesticating Control -- Notes -- Appendices -- Appendix 1: Patient Polly Brown -- Appendix 2: Patient Regina Farmer -- Appendix 3: Patient Jason Andro -- References -- Index.