Rights against Abolition
How Law and Rights perpetuate Psychiatric Coercition
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 4847331 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Emmanuelle Bernheim (0000-0003-4597-264X, University of Ottawa, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2025 |
| Volume | 384 |
| Pages | 118509 |
| Publication date | 2025-11-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Social Science & Medicine (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0277-9536 • E-ISSN: 1873-5347 |
| Publisher | Elsevier BV (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.1016/j.socscimed.2025.118509 |
| PMID | 40961638 |
| OpenAlex | W4413388513 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 62 |
This paper proposes a critical analysis of the role of law and rights in the use of coercive practices in psychiatry, which are increasing in Global North countries. The first part focuses on rights as a framework for coercion. The development of mental health legislation has not altered the historical criteria for coercive psychiatric practices but has formalized the link between mental health and risk or incapacity, with rights providing the framework for coercion and maintaining the status quo. The second part examines rights as a reason for coercion. Following the recognition of rights in mental health, the right to treatment has taken precedence over the right to consent and refuse care, and over procedural rights. Legislative and judicial initiatives have multiplied in recent years in the name of rights and through a compassionate approach, facilitating increasingly implicit, negotiated, and "consented to" psychiatric coercion practices. The third part analyzes rights as an obstacle to individual, collective, and political mobilization. It examines the barriers individuals face in claiming their rights in court, the impossibility of asserting structural rights violations within the justice system, and the inability to collectivize rights claims, highlighting how implementing marginalized groups' rights contradicts the legal system's foundations. Finally, by monopolizing and directing the struggle concerning psychiatric coercion, rights prevent the denunciation of the structural issues at its core
Coercion (linguistics · Criminology · Human rights · Mental health · Political science · Psychiatry · Child Abuse and Trauma · Healthcare Decision-Making and Restraints · Law · Philosophy · Psychiatric care and mental health services · Psychology
Social Order/Mental Disorder
Down, Out, and Under Arrest
Decolonizing Global Mental Health
Assessment of Patients' Competence to Consent to Treatment
Violence and mental disorders
About the concept of the “dangerous individual” in 19th-century legal psychiatry
Impact of statutory revisions to family-petitioned civil commitment in South Korea
Consumers' experiences of rights-based mental health laws
Examining the health and criminal justice characteristics for young people on compulsory community treatment orders
Experiences of involuntary psychiatric admission decision-making
The poison in the cure
Mental Health, Race and Culture
The Basaglia Law. Returning dignity to psychiatric patients
Sex and Gender in Psychiatry
Psychiatrization, assertions of epistemic justice, and the question of agency
Informed consent is a bit of a joke to me’
Freedom to negotiate
Criminogenic risk assessment
Mapping the shadow carceral state
Unreasonable Rights
Funding of Clinical Trials and Reported Drug Efficacy
Madness and Colonization
Conflict and antagonism within global psychiatry
The jurisprudence of therapeutic jurisprudence
The Mental Patients' Rights Movement and Mental Health Institutional Change
Exploring the views of people with mental health problems' on the concept of coercion
Reformed Commitment Procedures
Madness and Civilization
| Citation velocity | historical |
|---|---|
| Highly cited | No |