Mental Health and the law: An overview and the need to develop and strengthen the discipline of forensic psychiatry

Vedika Jogani

Remedial for quiz 10

Mental Health and the law: An overview and the need to develop and strengthen the discipline of forensic psychiatry

The given article talks of forensic psychiatry, the need to develop better intuitions in India and the means of going about it.

Forensic psychiatry, as defined by Pollack is a broad and general field in which psychiatry theories, concepts, principles, and practices are applied to any and all legal systems. It is a sub specialty of psychiatry related to criminology. It is a common based fact that people with mental disorders are vulnerable to abuse and violation. This violation can be stemmed from family members, care givers, loved ones etc. Hence, to ensure a good mental health of these vulnerable individuals proper and advised care needs to be given. The article talks about ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ laws. Hard laws are the ones that are binding and enforceable internationally and domestically. While, ‘soft’ laws are those laws that are not binding. In order to ensure better mental health laws need to be changed to make them more complaint international conventions. The article goes on to talk about mental health in India. PILS have changed the outlook of mental health in India. Instead of it being focusing only on institutional treatments, it is also spread to economic, social and cultural rights of a person. The reasons for the failure of institutionalising patients owes to the fact to the poor living condition, budgets, and voluntary admissions. In order to ensure good health care there is a large requirement of human resources, facilities and budgets. Word has spread to show that forensic psychiatry is just beyond criminology. The current state of psychiatry has very little infrastructure, no trained psychiatrists and decisions are made by trial and error. Thus, the state of forensic psychiatry is well beyond poor. Case studies done at the Bangalore prison and Tihar jail go on to show that 79.6% prisoners had been diagnosed by mental illness and substance abuse due to the enormous consumption of tobacco. Illnesses like depression and schizophrenia were common among prisoners guilty of major crimes.  While facing administrative and logistical issues the most common problem lies in the ethical issues. There is a constant conflict between ensuring well-being of the patient and that of society. The logistical issues include lack of background information, patient’s history, behavioural and serial mental examinations along with lack of information of the family background. The article concludes with giving suggestions on how this situation can be resolved in India. The proposed centre, called the Centre for Human Rights, Ethics, Law and Mental Health, has the objectives of increasing human resources, standards of diagnostic and investigation , art clinical and resource facilities, forensic services in the country, academia in this field, research and revamping the national policy for forensic psychiatry.

Therefore, this article talks about the poor conditions of the mental care in India simultaneously giving suggestions on how it can and should be improved.