Seventeen years after the United Nations called for an end to coercive psychiatric practices, forced treatment remains widespread, legally sanctioned, and largely unreformed.
In a new article published in a special issue of the International Journal of Law and Psychiatry on “Mental Health Law,” legal scholar Laura Davidson reviews the limited progress made in this area. Despite the 2006 adoption of the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD), which demanded a shift from involuntary treatment and institutional care to autonomy, equality, and non-discrimination, Davidson finds that the core practices the treaty sought to eliminate remain firmly entrenched.
Focusing on the legal frameworks of England and Wales but drawing implications for global mental health governance, Davidson critiques the continued dominance of the biomedical model and the political deadlock among UN bodies over coercive care.
“Hard cases”â those involving violence, crisis, or perceived incapacityâare still routinely used to justify detentions and forced interventions, in direct contradiction to the CRPD’s call for rights-based alternatives.
âThe wide-ranging scope of discriminatory, coercive practices prohibited under the CRPD encompass involuntary hospitalisation and enforced medical treatment, mechanical, physical, and chemical restraining, and forced seclusion and segregation,â she writes.
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