Mental disorders are ubiquitous, profoundly disabling and people
suffering from them frequently endure the worst conditions of life.
In recent decades both mental health and human rights have emerged
as areas of practice, inquiry, national policy-making and shared
international concern. Human-rights monitoring and reporting are
core features of public administration in most countries, and human
rights law has burgeoned. Mental health also enjoys a new dignity
in scholarship, international discussions and programs, mass-media
coverage and political debate. Today's experts insist that it
impacts on every aspect of health and human well-being, and so
becomes essential to achieving human rights. It is remarkable
however that the struggle for human rights over the past two
centuries largely bypassed the plight of those with mental
disabilities. Mental health is frequently absent from routine
health and social policy-making and research, and from many global
health initiatives, for example, the Millenium Development Goals.
Yet the impact of mental disorder is profound, not least when
combined with poverty, mass trauma and social disruption, as in
many poorer countries. Stigma is widespread and mental disorders
frequently go unnoticed and untreated. Even in settings where
mental health has attracted attention and services have undergone
reform, resources are typically scarce, inequitably distributed,
and inefficiently deployed. Social inclusion of those with
psychosocial disabilities languishes as a distant ideal. In
practice, therefore, the international community still tends to
prioritise human rights while largely ignoring mental health, which
remains in the shadow of physical-health programs. Yet not only do
persons with mental disorders suffer deprivations of human rights
but violations of human rights are now recognized as a major cause
of mental disorder - a pattern that indicates how inextricably
linked are the two domains. This volume offers the first attempt at
a comprehensive survey of the key aspects of this
interrelationship. It examines the crucial relationships and
histories of mental health and human rights, and their
interconnections with law, culture, ethnicity, class, economics,
neuro-biology, and stigma. It investigates the responsibilities of
states in securing the rights of those with mental disabilities,
the predicaments of vulnerable groups, and the challenge of
promoting and protecting mental health. In this wide-ranging
analysis, many themes recur - for example, the enormous mental
health burdens caused by war and social conflicts; the need to
include mental-health interventions in humanitarian programs in a
manner that does not undermine traditional healing and recovery
processes of indigenous peoples; and the imperative to reduce
gender-based violence and inequities. It particularly focuses on
the first-person narratives of mental-health consumers, their
families and carers, the collective voices that invite a major
shift in vision and praxis. The book will be valuable for
mental-health and helping professionals, lawyers, philosophers,
human-rights workers and their organisations, the UN and other
international agencies, social scientists, representatives of
government, teachers, religious professionals, researchers, and
policy-makers.
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