Involuntary commitment decisions orient to the "tenability" of situations that patients pose as alternatives to hospitalization. The initial chapters conceptualize involuntary commitment proceedings in terms of interpretive practice, review the history of confinement of the "insane" in the United States and contemporary involuntary commitment laws, and consider the organizational context and interactional organization of commitment proceedings. Another chapter shows how documents of competence and incompetence are interactionally produced during the course of commitment hearings. Two chapters maintain that participants in commitment hearings exhibit an orientation to the tenability of patients' community living circumstances as the basis for their arguments and examine the use of the mental illness assumption as an interpretive framework for assessing commitment-relevant claims, descriptions, and arguments. The final chapter examines the implications of understanding commitment decisions in terms of culturally grounded interpretive practice. 40 footnotes, 163 references, and 3 appendixes