HPOD Events
Mental Health, Legal Capacity, and Human Rights
Harvard Law School Library Book Talk with Professors Vikram Patel and Michael Ashley Stein
The United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities is changing the way service users, clinicians, and policy-makers think about mental health.
The United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD) continues to play a substantial role globally in shaping mental health policy making and clinical practice. The CRPD challenges its 184 states parties to undertake fundamental changes in their mental health laws and service systems in order to ensure that persons with psychosocial disabilities have equal opportunities to enjoy and exercise their right to health care on the basis of informed consent.
On March 29th, as part of the Harvard Law School Library's book talk series, HPOD Affiliated Faculty, Professor Vikram Patel, and HPOD's Executive Director, Professor Michael Ashley Stein, discussed Mental Health, Legal Capacity, and Human Rights, a volume they co-edited with HPOD associate Faraaz Mahomed and Charlene Sunkel of the Global Mental Health Peer Network. This interdisciplinary volume brings together diverse stakeholders from the Global North and Global South to offer a comprehensive analysis of legal capacity in the realm of mental health. The book's authors, including persons with psychosocial disabilities and their supporters and allies, hail from all corners of the globe and advance perspectives from across the spectrum. Together, they present a holistic overview of the complex issues at this exciting intersection and make recommendations for systemic change.
Professors Patel and Stein were joined for this Harvard Law School Library Book Talk by panelists Alberto Vásquez, a Peruvian disability rights attorney who contributed to the volume a chapter entitled, "The potential of the legal capacity law reform in Peru to transform mental health provision," and Harvard Law School Professor Gerald Neuman.
To learn more about some of HPOD's work to advance the rights of persons with psychosocial disabilites, read about the amicus intervention by the ESCR-net before the Inter-American Court of Human Rights in Guachalá Chimbo & Others v. Ecuador, as well as HPOD's third party submissions to the European Court of Human Rights in Bures v. Hungary and Pleso v. Hungary.
