Mental Health and Human Rights: Vision, Praxis, and Courage

This is a very big book – in size, in scope, and in the range of perspectives it contains. Both mental health and human rights are such vast and overlapping concepts that we lack a consensus on how humans should preserve or restore them. For instance, some people defend the right to treatment, even when people don’t want it; while others claim treatment without consent is a violation of human rights. International human rights agencies have rightly objected to the psychiatric incarceration of political dissidents in some countries while turning a blind eye to the compulsory regimes imposed upon ordinary citizens diagnosed with mental illness in other countries. Some experts lament the global inequities that have stalled the development of western style mental health systems in low income countries, while others warn that the introduction of these systems will deliver more profits for multi-national drug companies but worse outcomes for the people who receive them. This book acknowledges the varieties of discrimination against people with a diagnosis of mental illness in many countries and cultures, including the contribution made by even the most benign intentions within psychiatry and the law.