O tratamento digno do doente mental perigoso

: entre o direito penal e a nova lei da saúde mental

Abstract

Mental health is an increasingly topical issue, both in everyday life and in various professional fields, and it's no different in the field of law, more specifically in criminal law. When someone suffering from a mental illness commits a crime, don't have the capacity to understand that: in other words, they lack a guilty judgment about their conduct. In criminal law, to consider an act as a crime, we have to be faced with a typical unlawful and culpable fact and, in what concerns to mental health, if the agent is not at fault, the most logical thing would be to dismiss the area of criminal law to resolve the situation. However, this is not the case in our legal system, where part of the mentally ill - the dangerously incompetent - are relevant to criminal law. This paper aims to find out how our system resolves these situations, by analyzing the new Mental Health Law, seeing if there have been any notable changes, and also trying to offer a fresh view on the issue.

Date of Award	28 Nov 2025
Original language	Portuguese
Awarding Institution	Universidade Católica Portuguesa
Supervisor	Rogério Paulo Castanho Alves (Supervisor)