In a new article in Social Science & Medicine, legal scholar Emmanuelle Bernheim argues that the language of rights, far from dismantling coercion in psychiatry, often reinforces it.
Bernheim, a law professor and Canada Research Chair in Mental Health and Access to Justice at the University of Ottawa, traces how mental health legislation, court rulings, and international treaties have turned rights into a framework that both legitimizes and expands coercive practices.
“The development of mental health legislation has not altered the historical criteria for coercive psychiatric practices,” Bernheim writes. Instead, it has “formalized the link between mental health and risk or incapacity, with rights providing the framework for coercion and maintaining the status quo.”
Drawing on historical records, case law, and existing empirical research, Bernheim shows that the promise of rights has not reduced psychiatric coercion. Instead, rights provide the very terms through which coercion is justified, acting as both the framework and rationale for forced treatment, while also obstructing the collective mobilization needed to abolish it.
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I can’t believe an intellectual critique of the rights-based approach to ‘mental health’ is considered even research, let alone critical news. I think you should go and work for a psychiatric journal and replace them with very bad tempered and intelligent, empirical, rational and probably older and more grumpy men who know what they are doing and aren’t going to get carried away by other people’s intellectual sophistry and clever sounding smoke and mirrors behind which is absolutely nada. Don’t worry – I never criticize anyone personally. I blame America for destroying all your brains. (Only joking. I think there are still one or two working brains left. Inevitably they are very stressed and bad tempered).
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The journal is called “Social Science & Medicine”. I don’t get how can you expect something else than intellectual arguments. What do you want? Statistics about brain chemicals? As if those can argue for or against of depriving patients of rights.
This is a very important topic to discuss. the legal status of “insanity” is depriving people of autonomy, and “rights-based” discourse is actually enabling it – by distinguishing different “rights” that can be separately deprived of, instead of a whole functioning human being.
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Thank you for this important statement.
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