Tag: CRPD

Treating those struggling with emotional distress and troublesome behaviors as mentally disabled is a barrier to arriving at humane and dignified ways of assisting them.

The UN Committee on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities has announced a series of regional consultations on deinstitutionalization.

MIA's Emaline Friedman interviews legal scholar Piers Gooding on his work on disability rights and digital mental health technologies.

Public mental health authorities continue to oppress persons with psychosocial conditions through a combination of punitive and discriminatory laws that are constructed with a "best interests" paradigm in mind and a medical model that pathologises difference and dissent. 

MIA's Ana Florence interviews United Nations Special Rapporteur Dainius Pūras about his own journey as a psychiatrist and the future of rights-based approaches to mental health.

A new scale has been developed and validated to examine beliefs held by mental health professionals towards service users’ rights.

An interview with Celia Brown: psychiatric survivor, human rights activist, and president of MindFreedom International.

At a recent conference on legal capacity, I was struck by the failure of another invited expert to adhere to the paradigm of supported decision-making as articulated by the CRPD Committee. We still need to work to ensure that this paradigm is well understood and appreciated, despite the progress made in national reforms.

In an open letter to the World Psychiatric Association (WPA), users and survivors defend the UN CRPD and call for relinquishment of psychiatric power.

Debate ensues as scholars and policymakers discuss how to bring a rights-based approach to mental health policy.

Dr. Dainius Pūras argues that the status quo in mental health treatment is no longer acceptable and demands political action to promote human rights.

Peru has moved closer to full compliance with the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities than any other country in the world. Here I analyze the Peruvian reform as it pertains to legal capacity and the right to be free from disability-based detention and forced medical interventions.

The "North driving the South" phenomenon has evoked a strong counter response from TCI Asia Pacific and allied organizations (from Africa and Latin America) — especially when we know by now that the western model of psychiatry, based on colonial practices of isolation, seclusion, and coercion, is a failure.

On May 14 and 15, the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights held a meeting on human rights in mental health. The event represented tensions in the United Nations between the promotion of mental health and the promotion of the human rights of people with psychosocial disabilities under the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities.

The experience with the UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention's visit to the US is a watershed for our work against forced psychiatry. Step by step, global and national advocacy support each other as part of a worldwide movement to abolish forced psychiatry using the UN human rights framework.

From The Irish Times: The Mental Health (Amendment) Bill 2017, which is currently making its way through the Irish legislature, would enact key policies and...

The challenge to promote the rights of persons with psychosocial, intellectual and cognitive disabilities and to transform mental health services across the world is colossal. The QualityRights initiative seeks to provide actors everywhere with the tools that they need to become active agents for change.

Despite everyone's best intentions, the river of psychopharmacy was making its path through the global south, with no stops anywhere within policy or practice. INTAR India 2016 became very important for the global south against this rising tide and the overmedicalization of people's psychosocial distress and disabilities.

Something is lost, a great deal is lost, when we give up an independent advocacy platform about our own bodies and subsume our needs and rights into what medical professionals are motivated to fight for on our behalf.

For persons with psychosocial disabilities, one of the most fundamental rights laid out in the CRPD is the right to equal recognition before the law and legal capacity (Article 12). Our latest Position Paper focuses on Article 12 of the CRPD.

Mental Health Europe has launched a new animated video explaining Article 27 of the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities. Article 27...

It is possible to heal, and at the same time healing also means restoring the part of oneself that can face violence and disobey to protect what is most sacred. I am that sacred, and so are you.

Let’s be clear – I prefer to have no mental health legislation at all. The history and legacy of mental health legislation is anti-human rights, discriminatory, segregative, othering of people whose experiences of distress and states of consciousness are disapproved of by those who are able to fit more easily into social norms. Often too, “mental health legislation” is synonymous with “mental health acts” that are concerned with regulating involuntary commitment and compulsory treatment. It is with this in mind that I promoted the goal of “repealing mental health laws” and started the Campaign to Repeal Mental Health Laws.