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1821–2026 · Indiana session laws and the Indiana Code, with the county course
The law's first answer was the poorhouse itself: the 1821 act that created county poor asylums opened them to the insane, and the county superintendent was charged in 1848 to be a person of medical knowledge who would "care for the sick, infirm and insane." For the dangerous, an 1840 statute made it the duty of the justice of the peace, after a hearing before a jury, to appoint a suitable person to take charge of a dangerously insane person, compensated from county funds. The Constitution of 1851 then moved the obligation up: it expanded the state's required care to the insane, the deaf and the blind, and recognised "treatment and attempted cure" as the state's business, not custody alone — the constitutional footing under the state hospitals of the previous article, to which commitment ran from the county courts on examination and certificate, the committed person's county bearing its share through the township and county machinery that also funded the poorhouse. The traffic's direction reversed once in the twentieth century: a 1955 revision of the law allowed the state Division of Mental Health to place psychiatric-hospital patients in county homes for appropriate care, paid by the state, with a division representative required to visit each home quarterly to decide whether the placement stayed, returned to hospital, or was released — the statute under which Portage Manor became a receiving end of the state system as well as a sending one.
The modern code is Indiana Code Title 12, Article 26, "Voluntary and Involuntary Treatment of Mentally Ill Individuals," added by P.L. 2-1992 in the 1992 recodification of the human-services title and carried in force, amended, as of November 2026. It sets one standard and four doors. The standard: only a person who is mentally ill and either dangerous or gravely disabled may be detained or committed at all — diagnosis alone is not enough. The doors, in ascending order: immediate detention (IC 12-26-4), on a law-enforcement officer's reasonable grounds, for no more than 24 hours; emergency detention (IC 12-26-5), on written application endorsed by a physician, for a court-ordered hold measured in hours pending a hearing; temporary commitment (IC 12-26-6), ordered by the court after hearing for up to 90 days, to a facility or to outpatient treatment; and regular commitment (IC 12-26-7), for the person whose illness is expected to need care beyond 90 days, continuing until discharge or court termination. Who may start the case is written into the chapters: a temporary-commitment proceeding may be begun by an interested person's application, and for regular commitment the statute names the petitioners — a health officer, a police officer, a relative, a spouse, a guardian, a friend of the individual, a facility superintendent, or the prosecuting attorney. The local course of that law is the St. Joseph County courts': commitments from Clay and Harris townships run through the same county courts as the rest of the county's, and the receiving end in November 2026 is the designated centre and the county's inpatient house named in the closing article of this section — where the nineteenth-century court sent its committed to Indianapolis and Logansport, the modern court commits to the community system first and to the state hospitals, Logansport still among them, behind it.
Sources: St. Joseph County Home timeline (the 1821, 1840, 1848 and 1851 course; the 1955 placement law); Indiana Code 12-26-1 through 12-26-7 (as added by P.L. 2-1992, SEC. 20; the four detention and commitment chapters, the dangerous/gravely-disabled standard, the petitioner list for regular commitment); Indiana Disability Rights, "Rights of Adults Receiving Treatment in an Indiana Mental Health Facility" (rev. July 2017 — the four involuntary admission types and their code sections); The Indiana Lawyer, September 2026 (the 90-day temporary/regular line in current practice).