School of Law hosts second UK Mental Disability Law conference

The second UK Mental Disability Law conference attracted more than 110 scholars, NGO colleagues, and people with lived experience of mental distress to the School of Law.

Held on 26–27 June, the conference was a co-production of the School of Law, the Institute of Mental Health and Making Waves – a Nottingham-based organisation of users and survivors of psychiatry.

In the first plenary, Iris Elliott from the Irish Human Rights and Equality Commission, Julie Gosling form Making Waves and Paul Atkinson from Free Psychiatry Network looked at how austerity has affected and created mental health problems in the last decade. They also examined how law and other forms of advocacy can challenge government on these issues.

The second plenary saw Danius Puras, UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Health; Margret Osterfeld, German member of the Subcommittee for the Prevention of Torture; Georg Høyer, Norwegian member of the European Committee for the Prevention of Torture; Dorothy Gould from the National Survivor User Network and Eilionoir Flynn from the Centre for Disability Law and Policy, NUI Galway, discuss how we should understand and implement the 'new paradigm' of the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities.

The third plenary looked at mental health law reform in the UK and featured Simon Wessley, Chair of the Independent Review into the Mental Health Act in England and Wales; Colin McKay, Mental Welfare Commission for Scotland; and Diana Rose, Professor of User-Led Research, Institute of Psychiatry, King's College London.

Between these events were 47 papers in parallel sessions from scholars from across the UK and Ireland. They looked at the full range of issues in mental disability law, from capacity law to crime, and from welfare reform to compulsory detention and treatment. A pre- conference for doctoral students and early career researchers was organised the day before the main conference.

The conference is to be carried forward into a network. If you would like to be kept informed of developments or added to the email distribution list, please contact Peter Bartlett.