#MHForAll Webinar: Human Rights and Mental Health

#MHForAll Webinar: Human Rights and Mental Health

User profile image Angela - EENet Yoda Master
Feb 3, 2021 @ 7:12 am

Event date: -

Event type: Single day (a day or less)

This series of fortnightly webinars is run by United for Global Mental Health, The Lancet Psychiatry, Mental Health Innovation Network, and MHPSS.net.

These webinars are designed to provide policymakers and the wider health community with the latest evidence on the most pressing and often neglected issues of mental health around the world, including the impact of COVID- 19 on mental health. The webinars provide practical solutions to the challenging issues we are all grappling with. Participants are encouraged to join from around the world, including those with lived experience of mental health, and of COVID-19.

This week’s panel of speakers includes:

  • Julie Hannah (Senior Research Officer, Co-Director of the International Centre on Human Rights and Drug Policy, University of Essex)
  • Ana Lucia Arellano (International Disability Alliance)
  • Michael Njenga (Executive Council Member Africa Disability Forum/ Chief Executive Officer, Users and Survivors of Psychiatry in Kenya)
  • Reina De Bruijn-Wezeman (Netherlands Senator)
  • Alberto Vasquez (Chair)


Do you have questions you'd like to ask our panelists? Email us at webinars@unitedgmh.org to submit your questions.

Register for this free session.

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User profile image Angela - EENet Yoda Master

The recording is now available.

Key messages from the discussion:

  • We cannot advance the conversation around mental health without addressing the issue of human rights. The issue around the right to mental health is not new but is becoming a new and welcome focus within the global community, and we must expand on this.
  • Human rights can help guide us to structural causes of distress that violate and dehumanise individuals. They can help identify the need to act, and the needs of those left behind by harmful systems.
  • The conversation around mental health is sometimes too narrow. It often focuses on access to mental health services which are highly biomedical, rather than the quality of the services themselves.
  • Disability should in no case justify a deprivation of liberty. Principles of equality, non-discrimination, inclusion, should all be the basis of law, policy and practice. What was previously accepted under regular medical practice is today recognised under international human rights law as a human rights violation.
  • We must reframe the debate. We should not be having a conversation not just around access to mental health support, but around the full and effective participation of those with psychosocial disabilities.

It is clear that human rights are a non-negotiable issue for persons with psychosocial disabilities. We must reframe the debate, from not just having a conversation around mental health, but around the full and effective participation of those with psychosocial disabilities.

Feb 12, 2021 @ 7:53 am
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