Abstract
After its ratification of the 2006 United Nations Convention on the Rights of People with Disabilities (UNCRPD), the Indian government proceeded to work through a list of laws from various fields – employment, housing, healthcare, personal status – that would need to be amended to guarantee the rights in the UNCRPD. Regarding the healthcare of persons with mental illness, the law-drafters deemed it insufficient to merely amend the existing law and proceeded to draft a new, innovative mental healthcare law. When the Mental Healthcare Act (MHA) was passed in 2017, responses were strongly polarised: On the one hand, it was lauded for staying true to the vision of the UNCRPD (Duffy & Kelly, 2019), while on the other hand, especially psychiatrists heavily criticised that they anticipated the law would adversely affect their ability to treat patients
Highlights
After its ratification of the 2006 United Nations Convention on the Rights of People with Disabilities (UNCRPD), the Indian government proceeded to work through a list of laws from various fields – employment, housing, healthcare, personal status – that would need to be amended to guarantee the rights in the UNCRPD
From revisiting the specific innovations of the Mental Healthcare Act (MHA), it emerges that whenever the law presents human rights values, this is already done in association with things that the law-drafters had priorly singled out as problems
This paper has sought to answer why psychiatrists construe the Mental Healthcare Act 2017 as an “added fuss”, and to thereby untangle what exactly constitutes the “fuss”. It identified that psychiatrists’ criticism of the MHA is shaped by external and internal factors, external being the intentions of the law-drafters and how these are reflected in the law’s provisions, and internal being the professional culture of psychiatrists
Summary
After its ratification of the 2006 United Nations Convention on the Rights of People with Disabilities (UNCRPD), the Indian government proceeded to work through a list of laws from various fields – employment, housing, healthcare, personal status – that would need to be amended to guarantee the rights in the UNCRPD. Regarding the healthcare of persons with mental illness, the law-drafters deemed it insufficient to merely amend the existing law and proceeded to draft a new, innovative mental healthcare law. When the Mental Healthcare Act (MHA) was passed in 2017, responses were strongly polarised: On the one hand, it was lauded for staying true to the vision of the UNCRPD (Duffy & Kelly, 2019), while on the other hand, especially psychiatrists heavily criticised that they anticipated the law would adversely affect their ability to treat patients
Sign-in/Register to view highlights & summary Sign-in/Register to access full text options 
Free) 
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a call
