The Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities and the Social Model of Health: New Perspectives

Abstract

This paper argues that the CRPD moves toward a conceptual fusion of social, economic and cultural rights with civil and political rights, through its adoption of a social model of health. Accordingly, the CRPD sets out positive obligations on State parties to provide timely and appropriate treatment to people with mental illness, including the provision of adequate community and social services and a coherent system of integration between community and institutional facilities. The CRPD also supports a strict limitation on the provision of involuntary medical treatment, and reconciles these apparently competing objectives through an emphasis on autonomy, self determination and supported decision making. This interpretation of the CRPD, set out below, is based on an analysis of the thematic interconnections between the CRPD framework, the right to equal recognition before the law in Article 5 and Article 12, right to enjoyment of the highest attainable standard of health in Article 25, and the right to respect for physical and mental integrity in Article 17. It reads the CRPD as embedding a ‘new age’ of mental health law in the social model of health, and a recovery model of mental health.