Coercion in Community Mental Health Care: International Perspectives

The use of coercion is one of the defining issues of mental health care. Since the earliest attempts to contain and treat the mentally ill, power imbalances have been evident and a cause of controversy. There has always been a delicate balance between respecting autonomy and ensuring that those who most need treatment and support are provided with it. Coercion in Community Mental Health Care: International Perspectives is an essential guide to the current coercive practices worldwide, both those founded in law and those 'informal' processes whose coerciveness remains contested. It does so from a variety of perspectives, drawing on diverse disciplines such as history, law, sociology, anthropology and medicine to provide a comprehensive summary of the current debates in the field. Edited by leading researchers in the field, Coercion in Community Mental Health Care: International Perspectives provides a unique discussion of this prominent issue in mental health. Divided into five sections covering origins and extent, evidence, experiences, context and international perspectives this is ideal for mental health practitioners, social scientists, ethicists and legal professionals wishing to expand their knowledge of the subject area.

About the Author

Andrew Molodynski is a Consultant Psychiatrist at Oxford Health NHS Foundation Trust and Honorary Clinical Senior Lecturer at Oxford University, UK. He has worked in community psychiatry for fifteen years and been actively involved in research in the field for ten. His recent research has primarily focused on coercion in community mental health care but he has also published on social and occupational functioning in people with severe mental illness and on different forms of service provision. He has co- authored book chapters on assertive outreach and published a number of articles in peer-reviewed journals. He is the chair of the World Association of Social Psychiatry international working group on coercion and coordinates their website which aims to provide education and links for interested parties. Jorun Rugkåsa is a Senior Researcher at the Health Services Research Unit, Akershus University Hospital, Norway. She is a Social Anthropologist and Sociologist with over 15 years' experience of health and health services research and is an author of more than 50 scientific papers and reports. Her current research interests include treatment pressure, formal and informal coercion in community mental health services, personal experiences of coercion and the experiences of carers of people with mental health problems from ethnic minorities. In her role as Senior Researcher at the Department of Psychiatry in Oxford she teaches socio-cultural factors in the aetiology of mental illness, culturally inclusive service responses and migration and mental health to medical students and psychiatrists. Tom Burns is Professor Emeritus of Social Psychiatry at Oxford University. He worked as a psychiatrist in Scotland, Sweden, and London before moving to Oxford. His research is focused on interpersonal relationships in psychiatry and forms of care for patients with severe illnesses such as psychoses. He has authored over 200 scientific papers and chapters and is the author or co-author of five books. He was awarded a CBE for services to mental health in 2006.