Seminar: Human Rights and Mental Health Laws: From Coercion to Choice?

Seminar: Human Rights and Mental Health Laws: From Coercion to Choice?
Seminar: Human Rights and Mental Health Laws: From Coercion to Choice?

Principal speaker

Professor Bernadette McSherry

Abstract

Most developed countries have laws that permit the detention and treatment of individuals with severe mental health conditions without their consent. In Australia, a number of governments have recently undergone or are currently undertaking reviews of mental health legislation in the light of the principles set out in the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities. This Convention has generated debates about (a) whether mental health laws that enable involuntary detention and treatment should be abolished on the basis that they unjustifiably breach human rights; as well as (b) whether such laws can be reformed in the light of human rights principles to ensure respect for individual choices in relation to treatment. This presentation will explore what these debates may mean for the delivery of mental health services in the future.

About the speaker

Professor Bernadette McSherry is the Foundation Director of the Melbourne Social Equity Institute, University of Melbourne and an Adjunct Professor of Law at the Melbourne Law School and the Faculty of Law, Monash University. She is the President of the Australian and New Zealand Association of Psychiatry, Psychology and Law and a Commissioner with the Victorian Law Reform Commission. Professor McSherry served as a legal member of the Mental Health Review Board of Victoria from for seventeen years until July 2018 and has acted as a consultant to government on criminal law, sentencing and mental health law issues.

Professor McSherry will be at the Law Futures Centre to work with Dr Neeraj Gill and Associate Professor Susan Harris-Rimmer on their research project "Mental Health and Human Rights: Queensland Intersections and the Future of Care".


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RSVP

RSVP on or before Thursday 4 October 2018 , by email lawfutures@griffith.edu.au

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