Rights of the Terminally Ill Act 1995 11. The effect of the law was nullified in 1997 by the federal Parliament of Australia which passed the "Euthanasia Laws Act 1997". The Act continues on the Territory's statute books. Dr Philip Nitschke founded Exit International in response to the overturning of the Act. While voluntary euthanasia had previously been condoned officially in the Netherlands and the US state of Oregon, the act was the first time that a legislative assembly passed a law explicitly legalising euthanasia. The Act allowed a terminally ill patient to end their life with medical assistance, either by the direct involvement of a physician
Mentally ill people in United States jails and prisons 1955. They also noted increased percentages of mentally ill people in prisons throughout the 1970s and 1980s and found a strong correlation between the amount of mentally ill persons in a state's jails and prisons and how much money that state spends on mental health services. In the book "Criminalizing the Seriously Mentally Ill: The Abuse of Jails As Mental Hospitals", researchers note that while deinstitutionalization was carried out with good intentions, it was not accompanied with alternate avenues for mental health treatment for those with serious mental illnesses. According to the authors, Community Mental Health Centers focused their limited