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Psychosis and Human Rights: Conflicts in Mental Health Policy and Practice

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 April 2009

Helen Spandler  and
Tim Calton
Helen Spandler
Affiliation:
School of Social Work, University of Central Lancashire E-mail: HSpandler@uclan.ac.uk
Tim Calton
Affiliation:
Institute of Mental Health, University of Nottingham
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Abstract

This paper examines conflicts in polices in England and Wales pertaining to the demand for alternative, non-medical crisis support for those experiencing ‘psychosis’. We examine the limitations of current treatment, policy and legislative frameworks in supporting these demands. In particular, we focus on the limitations of prevailing conceptualisations of ‘human rights’, ‘social inclusion’ and ‘recovery’. These concepts, we argue, are embedded within a broader treatment framework which renders medication as mandatory and all other treatment modalities as inherently subsidiary, and a broader policy framework which is complicit with bio-medical orthodoxies of ‘mental illness’ and prioritises treatment compliance and compulsion. Therefore, in order to advance a ‘human rights’ approach to mental health policy, we argue that reigning orthodoxies inherent within policy and practice must be explicitly challenged to open up spaces for the availability of alternatives.

Type
Themed Section on Mental Health and Human Rights
Information
Social Policy and Society , Volume 8 , Issue 2 , April 2009 , pp. 245 - 256
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2009

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