Can anyone tell me what I need to put in front of that number to ring there from Australia?
The country code to dial into the US from outside the US is 001. So (I believe) you would dial, for example, 001-617-788-8525 or 001-617-788-8542.
--------
And regarding who can be locked away in mental wards, at some point I read a brief bit about the Soviet diagnosis "sluggish schizophrenia" which was used to lock up political dissidents.
And from this, I read mention as well that in in the US Civil Rights era perhaps that black men (political dissidents) in particular were labeled as schizophrenic and thus held in psych wards. I don't know anything about this though - how widespread, for how long, etc.
And I don't know the specifics of this either, but as long as homosexuality was labeled a mental illness, individuals in the US were thrown into psych wards for this also.
If it's now generally more difficult to have someone committed in the US (as SOC wrote), I'm guessing it's part of a pendulum swing reaction to psychiatry's abusive history (as mentioned above, plus forced lobotomies and forced sterilization - in the US).
On one the Pelletier articles, someone mentioned a Pennsylvania judge who had recently been found guilty of accepting bribes to sentence kids to detention facilities. Can't recall the details now, but Wiki perhaps said that this case was referred to in a Michael Moore film - and in 2014, a documentary on the case is supposed to be released.
I wonder how psychiatrists are involved in sentencing kids to such detention centers. What a nightmare.