Facing Existential Challenges, WHO Shuts Down its Policy, Law, and Human Rights Unit

“The Department of Policy, Law, and Human Rights at the World Health Organization is officially closed,” mental health podcaster and pianist Chad Lawson said in a video posted to Instagram on February 11. “Let that sit for a second.”

Lawson posted the video in response to an email announcing the closure from WHO unit staff Dr. Michelle Funk and Natalie Drew, which began circulating on February 10. The announcement prompted an outpouring of diverse responses from activists, practitioners, researchers, and policymakers around the world.

“I am not sure why I was shocked to see the WHO human rights unit shutting down,” Sera Davidow, co-founder of Roots Up, and who has provided guidance on rights-based support to the United Nations and WHO, told Mad in America via text message. “Yet shock was indeed my first reaction.”

“It’s not that [WHO’s] existence was exactly solving any of the myriad human rights crises across the world,” she added. “But shutting it all down sure does send a message across the international stage.”

Letters obtained by Mad in America show that the European Network of (Ex)-Users and Survivors of Psychiatry (ENUSP), along with the World Association for Psychosocial Rehabilitation (WAPR) and other organizations, had tried last December to convince WHO director-general Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus to halt the closure-in-progress.

“We firmly believe that this decision is neither well-founded nor irreversible,” ENUSP board president Olga Kalina wrote. “Hope is essential for recovery, and it is this hope that compels us to appeal directly to you.”

WHO’s press office did not respond to requests for comment.

The closure in context

While Funk and Drew did not provide reasons for the unit’s closure, their email referred to “considerable restructuring” that had occurred at WHO in recent months.

“WHO shutting down this unit didn’t come out of nowhere. It followed directly after the US withdrew its membership,” Davidow said. Trump had signaled withdrawal from the WHO via a January 2025 executive order, and it was officially completed on January 22 of this year.

“So much of what we are seeing in our own government is how their words and actions (or inactions) are emboldening people who are at the ready to trample the rights and dignity of various marginalized groups,” Davidow said. “This feels similar.”

Public health experts have said that the U.S. withdrawal will create a “slow bleed” effect globally, including a weakened ability at home to prevent and fight infectious disease. In response to the U.S. withdrawal, New York, California, and Illinois have already independently joined WHO’s Global Outbreak Alert and Response Network (GOARN), with other state governors mulling the same move.

“Are Trump, RFK Jr., and others in the current administration ever hesitating long enough to consider the implications of what they’re doing?” Davidow asked. “Or is it just about trying to show everyone who’s ‘boss’ and make sure they know that if they don’t follow our nation’s lead there will be a price to pay? I think it’s the latter and that is dangerous,” she said.

Dr. Marcello Maviglia, psychiatrist and Mad in Italy core contributor, shared further insights with Mad in America via email regarding changes at WHO, which he sees as having “increasingly moved away from its role as an independent guardian of public health.”

“Over the past two decades,” Maviglia wrote, “Its priorities have shifted toward market‑driven frameworks that mirror those of the World Bank, often at the expense of the communities most affected by inequity…Until the WHO confronts these contradictions openly, global mental health will continue to operate without the structural commitment needed for real change.”

Kristina Kapp, president and CEO of MindFreedom International, an organization whose tagline is “win human rights in the mental health system,” called the unit’s closure “a dangerous retreat from human rights.”

“By removing the entity dedicated to enforcing the CRPD within mental health systems, the WHO is prioritizing the comfort of the psychiatric establishment over the fundamental rights of survivors,” Kapp told Mad in America via email.

“MindFreedom International condemns this decision.”

A legacy forged in psychiatric survivor activism

In a February 10 LinkedIn post, Funk reflected on her “biomedical lens” prior to joining WHO. After hearing directly from psychiatric survivors who challenged her, her perspective shifted. “The lived experience network, particularly those who had first-hand experience with violence, abuses, and poor quality care in mental health systems and services, dismantled my assumptions, and I’m grateful they always held me accountable for taking action,” she wrote.

Hundreds of people commented on Funk’s LinkedIn announcement praising the Unit’s work, with several commenters referencing WHO’s QualityRights Initiative in particular. This extensive program provided training and technical assistance to individuals, organizations, and countries to enact policy and practice changes that align with international human rights standards such as the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities.

In an email to Mad in America, Dr. Piers Gooding, associate professor of law at Latrobe University and author of A New Era for Mental Health Law and Policy: Supported Decision-Making and the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, lamented the unit’s closure as “a loss for anyone seeking to advance human rights in the mental health context anywhere in the world.”

The surprise announcement comes a little less than a year after WHO issued its first new comprehensive policy guidance in 20 years. As Mad in America reported last year, hundreds of global advocates attended the launch event for the new guidance, which was hailed as a watershed moment and a “call to action.”

The March 2025 policy guidance, which called for “urgent transformation of mental health policies,” reflects decades of efforts by both the European and World Networks of (Ex)-Users and Survivors of Psychiatry and aligned activists and organizations, to eclipse the biomedical model with a rights-based approach.

In his video, Lawson uplifted the tangible impacts of the WHO unit: “This department helped shape how countries treat people with mental health conditions. Not theory. Actual laws, actual policies, actual training used all over the world. They helped governments move away from restraints, solitary confinement, forced treatment towards dignity and consent and community care. They built tools countries still rely on, and then trained over 150,000 people globally.”

Owen Ó Tuama, survivor, practitioner, and contributor to Mad in Ireland, told Mad in America via voice note that he has seen publications and advocacy from the human rights unit significantly affect policies and practice in many countries. “WHO provided the template for a strengthened resolve in achieving more progressive, less coercive, community-based mental health services,” he said.

The unit’s abrupt closure left many wondering what was next for global human rights work in mental health. “Up until now, WHO had at least staked a visible claim on the importance of the rights of disabled people, psychiatric survivors and other overlapping groups,” Davidow said. “They not only staked that claim, but sought out opportunities to uplift groups and communities who are intentionally doing things differently.”

“With that claim released, who or what moves into its place?”

Preservation of the unit’s work

In his response video, Lawson left viewers with a question and a challenge. “When a department disappears, the work just doesn’t disappear overnight. Who carries this forward? Who funds this? Who makes sure that these tools don’t quietly just fade away? Because mental health systems don’t improve by accident. They improve because someone refuses to let the work disappear. Right now, that’s the moment we’re in.”

It appears that most, if not all, of the unit’s publications have been preserved in various formats online. The QualityRights Initiative and training will still be housed within WHO, as part of the WHO Academy. And the remainder of the materials and documents will now be located within MiNDbank, described as “a global platform for key national and international policies, strategies, laws, service standards, evaluations, and other resources related to mental health, substance use, and suicide prevention.” MiNDbank is hosted by the Pune-based Centre for Mental Health Law & Policy (CMHLP) at the Indian Law Society (ILS).

Funk concluded her February 10 LinkedIn announcement by once again giving credit to the advocacy of directly-impacted people. “The work my team and I developed exists because of all of you who persisted – the lived experience network who challenged us, and the mental health professionals and colleagues who believed change was possible and worked to make it real.”

Human rights defenders who spoke to Mad in America remain resolute. “You cannot un-ring the bell of human rights,” MindFreedom’s Kapp wrote. “The standards for non-coercive, rights-based support established by this unit are now part of the international record. Institutions may step back, but our movement for dignity, autonomy, and freedom will not.”

Dainius Pūras, professor of psychiatry at Vilnius university and former UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Health, shared similar sentiments with Mad in America via email. “It is now more important than ever to strengthen the networks and coalitions of those forces that are on the side of change in mental healthcare and psychiatry. We are now equipped with new evidence, and with the WHO and UN Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) guidance, we are well aware of what should be the direction for the way ahead.”

“Our mission is to make this process of change irreversible,” Pūras wrote. (See complete statement from Dainius Pūras at the end of this article.)

“We have each other”: Reinvesting hope in a time of human rights under siege

The WHO announcement comes at an especially bleak time for human rights worldwide. Observers and defenders have been tracking the paradigm’s accelerating deterioration amid a “reverse wave” where democracy is in decline, giving way to authoritarianism globally.

The gulf between international human rights ideals and emergency realities on the ground has prompted many to reconsider the future of the paradigm.

Writing in Al-Jazeera in September 2023, Tunisian academic Haythem Guesmi declared: “Human rights, as we know them, are dead.” He described how human rights standards have been contested almost since the inception of the Universal Declaration on Human Rights in 1948. “The very nations that developed and pushed for the new human rights regime swiftly started to violate it to further their interests…” he wrote.

Guesmi called for a reimagining human rights as “radically different egalitarian and progressive principles” that are “informed by the struggles and ethics of the people in the Global South.”

Phil Lynch and Pooja Patel, writing on behalf of the International Service for Human Rights, called for decolonization: “The work, struggles and realities of Global South, feminist and queer human rights defenders and activists, which have taken place over decades, must be recognised and reflected in human rights discourse and priorities.”

Flick Grey, in a text message sent to Mad in America, called for the redirection and reinvestment of hope in the wake of the WHO announcement. “The international human rights paradigm tied us to hopes in the morality (we hoped!) of international colonial power. It brought us luminary progress. For example, the CRPD directed much of our advocacy towards cross-disability visions of inalienable human dignity and inviolable bodily autonomy. But we lost sight that it was always grounded on stolen land. It didn’t ‘fail’ in Palestine. It revealed its structure and underlying moral depravity. Colonial power only recognises some bodies as human, and only so long as we defer to its ultimate power.”

“Those of us who have been dehumanised to the point of rupture and violated by the State at our most vulnerable, know this in our bones. And yet we held hope.”

“The closure of the WHO human rights unit is a blow to our hopes for a dignified world,” Grey wrote. “And as Chelsea Watego so potently declares in her book Another Day in the Colony: ‘Fuck Hope!’ which I understand to mean that we must divest from hope in institutions grounded on stolen land. We have each other, we ground on the land, and we (learn to) dignify each other in much more expansive ways.”

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Statement from Dr. Dainius Pūras

With all understanding about the financial constraints affecting the entire UN system and WHO, and hence the structural changes within WHO, I am joining many organizations and experts to express deep concern about the closure of the Policy, Law, and Human Rights unit. This change may very likely have a negative impact on global developments in the field of mental health.

In recent years there has been a needed shift from over-reliance on the biomedical model towards highlighting the need to invest in sustainable, non-coercive, rights-based mental health services worldwide. This much-needed change was possible because WHO, with its QualityRights initiative, took the leadership. The policy guidance developed by WHO based on the QualityRights initiative (2021, 2023, 2025) has sent a very clear message to UN Member States and other stakeholders about the need to fully embrace human rights and to abandon outdated laws, practices and attitudes in the field of global mental health. This process of change is now going on in the Global South and Global North, with an increasing “coalition of willing.” Among many other stakeholders, the World Psychiatric Association has joined the movement, with its campaign to substantially reduce coercion within mental health services.

However, we all also know that the process of change is very fragile, and there is still a lot of reluctance and resistance to change, especially on the national policy level. After these structural changes within WHO, what message will be sent from Geneva headquarters and from regional WHO offices about mental health and human rights? The closure of the important unit may be perceived as a retreat of WHO from its commitment to fully embrace human rights in mental healthcare. There are many pitfalls that could lead to push-backs. For example, overemphasizing and prioritizing the need to address treatment gaps and to promote “brain health,” undermines the core need. We know the core need is to prioritize the human rights-based approach, ending the legacy of discrimination.

With all these risks, it is even more important than ever now, to strengthen the networks and coalitions of those forces that are on the side of change in mental healthcare and psychiatry. We are now equipped with new evidence and the guidance of WHO and the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR), so we are well aware of what the direction should be going forward. Our mission is to make this process of change irreversible. There are many pathways that should reinforce each other—changes in national laws, increasing investments in rights-based, non-coercive alternatives, new priorities in training and research, and advocacy activities. Most importantly, the legacy of discrimination, institutionalization, over-medicalization, and disempowerment must be abandoned, and human rights must prevail, with sustainable implementation of the Convention of the Rights of Persons with Disabilities. In the Global South and in the Global North, we need to find Member States that could be champions in the field of mental health and human rights.

Dainius Pūras
Professor, Clinic of Psychiatry, Vilnius University
Former (2014-2020) UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Health