§ 144.001.Definitions

A definition of extraordinary specificity, and the specificity is the history.

"Former mental health patient" means an individual who: between January 1, 1986 and December 31, 1993 was admitted to a mental health facility that has pled guilty — or whose parent or affiliate corporation has — to unlawfully conspiring to offer and pay remuneration to any person to induce that person to refer individuals for services to such a facility; has been released; and was not admitted on the basis of a court proceeding that included a commitment hearing on the record.

All three conditions are cumulative, and the first names a specific criminal history. The chapter is addressed to the psychiatric hospital scandals of that period, in which chains were found to have paid for patient referrals and admitted people who did not need admission.

The third condition is the principled one. Someone committed after a hearing on the record was admitted by judicial determination, and the chapter does not reach them. It is confined to admissions that happened without that safeguard — which is where the fraud operated.

"Record" is defined to exclude anything federal law requires to be kept, or for which the federal retention requirement has expired. The chapter cannot direct destruction of what federal law requires preserved, and says so in the definition rather than as an exception.

"Court" means a district or statutory probate court.

The remedy the chapter supplies — sealing and destruction of records, and a right to deny the admission ever happened — is unusual enough that the narrow definition is what makes it defensible.