Forced psychiatry is made a violation of international law under the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD).

The Report on Improving Mental Health Outcomes provides an evidentiary basis for abolishing forced psychiatry. 

Materials from the UN CRPD monitoring body explain the obligation to abolish forced psychiatry: General Comment on Legal Capacity, Guidelines on Liberty and Security of the Person, and Guidelines on Deinstitutionalization.

UN CRPD and the Right to be Free From Nonconsensual Psychiatric Interventions argues that forced psychiatry amounts to torture, and Reimagining Crisis Support makes a case for crisis support outside the mental health system using CRPD principles.

For more resources related to prohibition of forced psychiatry under international law, see https://www.chrusp.org.

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We will be adding material to this page periodically, to respond to the community’s questions and interests.

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1. Criminalization

Some of you asked how our principles apply to the insanity defense and issues of criminality.  As a group we are clear that abolition of involuntary psychiatric hospitalization applies to people convicted of crimes, or acquitted by reason of insanity, as well as to anyone else.  

Rethinking Criminal Responsibility From a Critical Disability Perspective: the Abolition of Insanity/Incapacity Acquittals and Unfitness to Plead, and Beyond argues based on the CRPD for an equal and equitable approach to criminal responsibility.  An Amicus brief to the International Criminal Court applies this approach to the law and facts of a particular case.

An Amicus brief to a Mexico City criminal court (in Spanish and English) argues for abolition of criminal non-responsibility (‘inimputabilidad’) and related forced psychiatric interventions from a CRPD human rights perspective.

The Principles on the Decriminalisation of Petty Offences in Africa indicate policies that could be pursued in any country, and show the problem is not limited to the United States.