ABSTRACT
Mental health laws are a longstanding feature of the mental health services sector, providing for drugs and other interventions to be forced upon individuals deemed Mad and judged as meeting statutory criteria relating to dangerousness and disorder. This chapter considers how mental health law compounds the symbolic violence of psychiatry and sanctions processes of ontological nullification, whereby any resistance to mental health norms may be re-interpreted as more certain evidence of ‘illness’. Reflections are then offered on two fields offering valuable lines of resistance mental health service users and survivors of psychiatry may pursue. It is suggested that Boaventura de Sousa Santos’ anti-colonial scholarship, in particular his work on the ‘sociology of absences’ theorising processes for challenging colonial domination, holds promise for recovering the deliberately absented knowledges of those who have been subjected to mental health law. The chapter highlights the potential for international human rights to be used strategically to harness such absent knowledges, focusing on developments since the introduction of the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities.
