Therapeutic (In)justice and the Shadow Carceral State: An Ethnographic Study in Mental Health Courtrooms (The Politics of Mental Health and Illness)

This open access book draws on unique ethnographic fieldwork carried out in four Quebec mental health courtrooms to examine the role courts play in the organization and implementation of psychiatric coercion.It provides a much-needed critical and empirical analysis of these judicial practices at a time when social inequalities have been deepening and the legal devices that facilitate psychiatric coercion in hospitals or in the community have been multiplying, and where the voices of psychiatrically labeled individuals are marginalized. Employing a cross-sectional and structural analysis of judicial practices across different mental health courtrooms, this research investigates the coercive and violent dimensions of a process that is considered therapeutic.The book offers a critical, intersectional analysis of judicial practices, highlights the multiple legal procedures and court orders individuals can be subjected too, and examines the development of a mental health justice market.The