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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