[Further developments in legislation governing guardianship and nursing care laws (author's transl)]

The legal measures covering protection and care in connection with legislation governing guardianship and fosterage involving medical nursing, which have remained unchanged in principle since 1896, increasingly create the risk of obstructing and hampering the treatment and rehabilitation of mental patients. In order to counteract this development, which is hostile to therapy, as can be demonstrated by means of concrete examples, a number of differentiated deliberations to improve the situation have been included in the expertise preparatory to the inquiry on the situation of psychiatry in the Federal Republic of Germany, dated 1975. These suggestions, which are well differentiated and aim at a minimum restriction of the rights of the individual in respect of protection of his personality, seem to be hardly sufficiently known, so that no use is made of them in public, political and expert discussions. Hence it appeared necessary to point once again to these suggestions as impressively as possible.