Analysis

A Critique of Coercive Psychiatry: Autonomy, Medicine, and Power

By Daniel Sardá · Published on August 21, 2026

25 min read5,304 words

A critique of institutionalized medicine and coercive psychiatry centered on autonomy, paternalism, consent, and limits on power over the patient.

Coercive psychiatry raises a question that goes beyond clinical practice: when can medical knowledge legitimately become power over another person's body, will, and liberty?

Medicine possesses scientific authority that is difficult to dispute. A physician may diagnose more accurately than a patient, estimate risks with greater precision, and recommend interventions capable of relieving suffering or saving a life. Yet technical superiority does not automatically entail a right to decide for another person.

There is a fundamental difference between saying “this treatment would probably benefit you” and saying “this treatment would probably benefit you and therefore we may impose it even if you refuse.” The first proposition belongs to medical knowledge. The second belongs to the problem of power.

This analysis does not require denying medicine, the existence of mental disorders, or the effectiveness of particular psychiatric treatments. Nor does it require attributing bad faith to physicians, institutions, or relatives. To isolate the problem, we can even grant the most favorable scenario: the diagnosis is correct, the professional is competent, the treatment has a reasonable probability of working, and those seeking intervention sincerely believe they are acting in the patient's best interest.

The decisive question still remains: what turns knowledge of what might benefit another adult into a right to override that adult's will?

The thesis of this article is that expert knowledge does not, by itself, confer jurisdiction over the person. Medicine may inform, diagnose, recommend, persuade, and treat with consent. When it seeks to restrict someone's liberty or intervene on that person's body against an express refusal, it requires a different and far more demanding justification.

The problem does not begin with psychiatry. It belongs to a broader debate about individual autonomy, paternalism, medicalization, and the institutional expansion of medicine. But it reaches a particular intensity in coercive psychiatry, where diagnosis, capacity assessment, risk assessment, deprivation of liberty, and involuntary treatment can converge.

To understand why that concentration of power is problematic, it is useful to begin with the underlying principle: what authority does the individual have over himself, and what must anyone who seeks to override it prove?

1. Bodily sovereignty, coercion, and paternalism

The starting point is straightforward: there is a sphere over which each individual possesses especially strong authority, and that sphere includes his or her own body.

John Locke formulated one of the classical antecedents of this idea through the notion of property in one's own person. Later liberal and libertarian traditions developed the intuition through concepts such as self-ownership, personal autonomy, and bodily sovereignty.

One need not adopt a literal property theory of the body to accept its basic insight: a person has an especially strong claim to decide what is done to him or her. That idea connects directly with individual sovereignty: the person does not belong to the state, a majority, an institution, or a third party.

John Stuart Mill pushed the argument further. In On Liberty, he argued that a person's own physical or moral good is not, by itself, sufficient reason to exercise coercion over that person, and he explicitly formulated the individual's sovereignty over his own body and mind. His principle concerns adults in possession of their faculties and distinguishes harm to others from conduct that principally concerns the individual himself (Mill, 1859).

This is the foundation for an essential distinction:

epistemic authority is not the same as personal authority.

An oncologist may know more than I do about cancer. A surgeon may assess the probabilities of an operation better than I can. A psychiatrist may possess knowledge of psychopathology that I do not have.

None of that is in dispute.

What requires an additional justification is the move from:

“I know more than you about this subject”

to:

“therefore I may decide for you.”

That move is political and moral, not scientific.

It also requires distinguishing persuasion from coercion. Informing, advising, arguing, and trying to convince are forms of influence compatible with autonomy. Coercion introduces a different logic: a decision is conditioned by force, threat, or a consequence controlled by another agent strongly enough to materially reduce freedom of choice.

Not every difficulty or form of pressure is coercion. For that reason, the term should not be used indiscriminately. But coercion should not be reduced to visible physical violence either. A threat backed by a sanction can radically alter the structure of a decision.

Libertatis Venezuela has already examined this issue in “State Coercion: What It Is and Why It Concerns Classical Liberalism”: the state does not merely recommend; it can impose obligations through rules, sanctions, courts, and public force. This does not make every instance of state coercion illegitimate, but it does require questions about justification, proportionality, limits, and institutional controls.

In medicine, the issue takes a particularly delicate form because coercion is often justified not as punishment but as beneficence.

This is where paternalism enters.

Paternalism consists, broadly speaking, in interfering with a person's liberty or autonomy on the grounds that the interference will benefit that person (Dworkin, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy). The philosophical discussion distinguishes interventions aimed at determining whether a decision is genuinely autonomous from interventions that override an understood and voluntary decision because an authority regards it as mistaken.

The latter is the more difficult case.

An intervention can be beneficial and still be coercive.

Beneficence and coercive legitimacy are not the same thing.

2. The right to make mistakes and the dignity of risk

Autonomy has real content only if it protects more than decisions that other people regard as correct.

People make bad decisions constantly. They smoke, drink, eat poorly, practice dangerous sports, refuse operations, abandon treatments, waste opportunities, or assume risks that others consider absurd.

None of this requires us to approve those decisions.

We may criticize them. We may argue against them. We may warn about their consequences.

But a liberty that disappears whenever someone chooses badly is liberty in name only.

Mill is especially demanding on this point. He does not merely distinguish self-regarding harm from harm to others; with respect to conduct that primarily concerns the individual, he argues that other people's judgment that the conduct is wrong is not, by itself, sufficient reason to prevent it (Mill, 1859).

A difficult but unavoidable proposition follows:

the right to govern one's own life includes the right to govern it imperfectly.

Applied to health:

the right to manage one's own health must include some right to manage it badly.

Otherwise there is no meaningful health sovereignty. There is only conditional permission: you may decide as long as you choose what others consider sufficiently prudent.

Contemporary bioethics offers a useful concept for this problem: the dignity of risk. The idea appears in discussions of autonomy, care, and disability as a reminder that protecting someone from every risk can itself become a way of depriving that person of self-determination (Hulkower, 2022).

This does not mean every risk must be passively accepted. Nor does it mean every self-harming act is necessarily an autonomous decision.

The more limited—and stronger—conclusion is this:

risk and incapacity are different concepts.

A decision may be dangerous and still be understood.

A person may know that a particular course of action will damage his health and still prefer it for reasons other people do not share.

This is one of the deepest difficulties of medical paternalism: if a sufficiently harmful choice could, by itself, be treated as proof that the person lacks decision-making capacity, autonomy would disappear precisely when it produces outcomes the authority disapproves of.

3. When medicine ceases to be merely a service

Medicine can relate to the individual in two conceptually different ways.

In the first, it functions as a service.

The person seeks knowledge and assistance. The professional diagnoses, explains, recommends, and offers treatments. Expertise expands the patient's available options.

In the second, medicine acquires the characteristics of institutional authority.

It no longer merely supplies information. It may also classify, supervise, establish criteria of normality, determine who requires intervention, and, in certain settings, participate in decisions that override the individual's will.

There is no absolute boundary between these forms. Every specialized profession exercises some cultural authority. The problem arises when professional authority begins to turn into jurisdiction over the patient's life.

Ivan Illich provided one of the most radical frameworks for analyzing this transformation.

Iatrogenesis and the expropriation of health

In Medical Nemesis and his 1975 essay on the medicalization of life, Illich argued that medicine should not be evaluated only by its clinical successes. The harms generated by its own institutional expansion also had to be examined (Illich, 1975).

Clinical iatrogenesis is the most obvious form: treatments, procedures, or drugs can cause harm.

For this analysis, however, the other two forms matter more.

Social iatrogenesis appears when medical institutions create dependency and progressively expand their jurisdiction over experiences that previously did not necessarily require professional administration.

Cultural iatrogenesis goes further: a society may lose part of its capacity to interpret and manage experiences such as pain, illness, aging, or death on its own.

This is the deeper meaning of the phrase expropriation of health.

It does not mean physicians literally “steal” health. It describes a displacement of competence and authority from individuals and communities toward professional systems.

Illich's paradox is worth preserving even if one does not accept all of his conclusions:

an institution can increase its technical capacity while simultaneously reducing the autonomy of those who depend on it.

Peter Conrad examined a related process through the concept of medicalization. His classic review analyzes how particular problems or experiences come to be defined and treated within a medical framework, and explicitly studies the relationship between medicalization and social control (Conrad, 1992).

Irving Zola had earlier described medicine as an institution capable of acquiring functions of social control. His thesis was not that every medical act is social control, but that medical jurisdiction was expanding into increasingly broad areas of life (Zola, 1972).

Eliot Freidson, from the sociology of professions, developed the thesis of professional dominance, emphasizing the medical profession's institutional autonomy and its historical ability to control substantial aspects of its own work and of the definition of illness. Later literature has debated how much of that dominance has eroded, so medical power should not be presented as a timeless constant (Freidson discussion).

These perspectives allow us to reconstruct an important conceptual sequence:

experience or conduct → medical definition → diagnosis → professional authority → possibility of intervention.

The sequence does not necessarily produce coercion.

Most medical relationships can stop at:

diagnosis → recommendation → consent or refusal.

Psychiatry presents a special difficulty because, under certain conditions, the sequence can continue beyond refusal.

4. Coercive psychiatry as a limiting case

It is useful to distinguish two different realities at the outset.

Voluntary psychiatry can operate like any other medical relationship: a person consults a professional, accepts or refuses recommendations, and decides whether to continue.

Coercive psychiatry adds a different element.

It may involve involuntary hospitalization, seclusion, restraint, or other measures that restrict autonomy and liberty. A broad ethical review by Chieze and colleagues identifies conflicts involving autonomy, safety, beneficence, non-maleficence, decision-making capacity, and the risk of abuse of power. The review also treats as relevant the point that neither treatment refusal nor the existence of mental disorder alone establishes incapacity (Chieze et al., 2021).

This is where the problem becomes concentrated.

Not because psychiatry treats “the mind” while other branches do not.

But because certain forms of psychiatric practice can combine:

diagnostic authority + capacity assessment + risk assessment + restriction of liberty + therapeutic intervention.

Thomas Szasz carried this criticism to a much more radical conclusion.

In The Case Against Psychiatric Coercion, he defines coercive psychiatric intervention as the imposition of an allegedly diagnostic or therapeutic intervention against the subject's will, legitimized by the state through arguments about protecting the individual or the public (Szasz, 1997).

One need not accept Szasz's entire theory to recognize the importance of this distinction.

Indeed, the argument becomes intellectually stronger if it does not depend on his most controversial claims about mental illness.

We can assume the illness exists.

We can assume the diagnosis is correct.

We can assume the treatment is good.

A different question remains:

why should those premises be sufficient to legitimize force?

His concept of the therapeutic state identifies precisely this transformation: power is no longer justified only in the name of punishment or order; it is also justified through the protection of health and welfare.

The purpose may be benevolent.

That does not make the problem of power irrelevant.

5. Diagnosis, capacity, and authority over interpretation

One of the points requiring the greatest precision is decision-making capacity.

Psychiatric diagnosis and incapacity are not synonyms.

Contemporary ethical literature insists on separating the two questions. Chieze and colleagues note that neither the presence of mental disorder nor refusal of treatment by itself entails incapacity. Tilman Steinert argues that coercive treatment can be justified, on his account, only when the capacity to consent is substantially impaired and there is a serious danger that cannot be prevented by less intrusive means (Steinert, 2017).

Harry Hudson directly examines psychiatric inpatients who retain capacity and argues against involuntary treatment in those cases (Hudson, 2019).

This permits a simple comparison.

A patient with a serious somatic illness may understand that refusing treatment substantially increases the risk of death and still retain the right to refuse if he has capacity.

If a psychiatric patient understands the nature of an intervention, its possible benefits, its risks, and the consequences of refusing it, the mere presence of a diagnosis does not by itself explain why that patient's refusal should carry less weight.

The problem of insight

A more delicate issue follows: insight.

It would be unserious to claim that lack of insight is fictional. It is a real clinical concept, and certain conditions can profoundly affect a person's ability to recognize aspects of his or her situation.

The problem is institutional.

A structure can arise in which:

the professional makes a diagnosis → the patient rejects it → the rejection is interpreted as additional evidence of lack of insight → the credibility of the refusal decreases.

The claim here is not that this sequence necessarily occurs or that it is always mistaken.

The objection is that it contains a circular potential: the same authority seeking to intervene may also possess epistemic power to interpret opposition to that intervention.

Miranda Fricker's concept of epistemic injustice is useful here. Paul Crichton, Havi Carel, and Ian James Kidd applied it directly to psychiatry and argue that people with mental disorders may be especially vulnerable to having their testimony accorded less credibility because of stereotypes of irrationality or unreliability (Crichton, Carel & Kidd, 2017).

This allows the criticism to be stated more precisely.

The point is not that the patient is always right.

Nor that professional interpretation is necessarily a form of domination.

The point is to recognize an asymmetry.

A person deprived of liberty may become angry, distrustful, protest, insist on leaving, or refuse to cooperate.

Those behaviors may contain clinical information.

But some may also be understandable reactions to the restriction itself.

The problem arises when an institution simultaneously has power to produce the situation and authority to determine the official meaning of the person's reaction to it.

6. Hospitalization, institutions, and coercion beyond physical force

Involuntary hospitalization and restriction of liberty

Involuntary hospitalization has a therapeutic purpose.

It also restricts liberty.

Both statements can be true at the same time.

If a person wishes to leave a facility and legal or physical authority exists to prevent it, that person's liberty is being restricted. For this reason, ethical literature does not treat involuntary hospitalization as merely a clinical modality but as an intervention requiring specific ethical and legal justification (Chieze et al., 2021).

Goffman and the institutional concentration of power

In Asylums, Erving Goffman developed the concept of the total institution to study environments in which much of the daily life of their members is organized under a common administrative authority.

It would be wrong to transfer Goffman's description mechanically to every contemporary psychiatric unit.

Its usefulness lies elsewhere: it gives us an analytical question.

How many dimensions of a person's life does the institution control at the same time?

Movement. Schedules. Privacy. Personal belongings. Visits. Communications. Treatment. The possibility of leaving.

The greater the concentration of those powers, the greater the institutional asymmetry and the more important external controls become.

Communications deserve particular attention. There is no basis for claiming that every restriction on phone use is illegitimate; there may be specific reasons involving safety, privacy, or clinical functioning. But neither should hospitalization automatically render every additional restriction irrelevant.

The question should be asked separately:

is this particular restriction necessary for this particular person, for this amount of time, and for this reason?

The same analysis applies to other restrictions.

Informal coercion and real voluntariness

Coercion can also exist without the visible application of force.

A systematic review and meta-synthesis of involuntary hospitalization decisions found communication problems and power imbalances among service users, carers, and professionals, as well as professional rationalizations of coercion based on the belief that professionals knew what was best for the service user (Sugiura, Pertega & Holmberg, 2020).

This requires distinguishing:

formal consent

from

material voluntariness.

A signature does not settle the issue if the real structure of options is to accept an intervention or face a severe institutional consequence.

Not every clinical negotiation is coercive. But neither should every acceptance obtained under institutional threat be described without qualification as a free decision.

7. Self-harm, harm to others, and dangerousness

A major source of confusion is grouping two morally different situations under the single concept of “dangerousness.”

The first is:

the person may harm himself or herself.

The second is:

the person may harm other people.

From a perspective grounded in the harm principle, they are not equivalent.

Harm to oneself

This is the classic paternalistic case.

The concern may be entirely rational. A person may face a grave risk.

But the existence of risk does not yet resolve two different questions:

1. does the person retain the capacity to understand what is happening? 2. if so, what justifies overriding that person's decision?

Simply choosing something harmful does not establish incapacity.

Otherwise, the content of the decision itself becomes a circular criterion for determining who is entitled to decide.

For that reason, it is important to maintain a strong distinction:

risk is not the same as incapacity.

This does not require denying emergency intervention when there is a genuine loss of capacity. It requires refusing to treat a harmful decision as an automatic equivalent of incapacity.

Harm to others

Here the argument changes.

Mill identifies prevention of harm to others as the strongest basis for limiting individual liberty (Mill, 1859).

But psychiatry introduces an additional problem: often what is at issue is a prediction of risk, not harm already committed.

That means deprivation of liberty may rest on a probabilistic estimate about future conduct.

And probabilistic predictions can be wrong.

Therefore, even where protecting third parties supplies a much stronger justification, questions remain about:

• the intensity and imminence of the risk;
• the available evidence;
• the duration of the restriction;
• proportionality;
• independent review;
• the least restrictive alternative.

These requirements connect with broader principles of the rule of law: the more serious the interference of power with a person, the more important rules, procedures, review, and limits on discretion become.

Acknowledging that protecting others can justify coercion does not require accepting every standard of dangerousness.

8. Relatives and third parties: concern is not sovereignty

Psychiatric power is not always activated only by physicians or public officials.

Families may play an important role during crises. That is understandable. They are often the people who know recent changes in behavior, have witnessed disturbing episodes, or have carried a substantial burden of care.

But kinship does not eliminate problems of autonomy.

A relative may deeply love another person and still be mistaken about what that person needs.

A relative may interpret behavior partially.

A relative may have interests of his or her own.

There may be conflict.

Or the relative may simply value safety much more heavily than the person who is the object of intervention.

Research shows that patients and carers can experience the same admission very differently. In a study by Ranieri and colleagues, carers of involuntarily admitted patients perceived the admission as less coercive and more procedurally fair than the patients themselves did (Ranieri et al., 2015).

This does not show that relatives act in bad faith.

It shows something more important:

the intention to protect and the experience of being coerced can coexist.

The review by Sugiura and colleagues also identified communication problems and power imbalances among service users, carers, and professionals during involuntary admission processes (Sugiura, Pertega & Holmberg, 2020).

The normative conclusion that can be drawn is clear:

kinship creates relationships, responsibilities, and potentially valuable information; it does not create sovereignty over another adult.

There is a difference between being concerned, advising, persuading, requesting an assessment, and actually having mechanisms capable of overriding another person's will.

The question calls for even greater caution when family, financial, domestic, or property conflicts exist.

There is no basis for claiming that psychiatry is routinely used as an instrument in such disputes.

The institutional argument is different.

If statements by third parties can help trigger measures with serious consequences for someone's liberty, the system must be capable of resisting information that is mistaken, exaggerated, self-interested, or deliberately false.

Not because every relative lies.

But because no serious system should depend on the assumption that every informant is neutral.

9. Forced medication, bodily integrity, and consent

Involuntary hospitalization primarily affects freedom of movement.

Involuntary medication adds direct intervention into the body.

In psychiatry, drugs may produce physiological, behavioral, and subjective changes. Joanna Moncrieff and David Cohen distinguish between a disease-centered model, according to which a drug acts on a pathological process, and a drug-centered model, which focuses on the physiological, behavioral, and subjective effects produced by the substance itself and their possible clinical usefulness (Moncrieff & Cohen, 2005).

What informed pharmacological consent requires

One need not adopt Moncrieff's theory in full to draw a narrower conclusion:

pharmacological consent requires sufficiently accurate information about the expected effects of the drug, the intended benefits, and the relevant risks or adverse effects.

This is not an argument against psychiatric medication.

The question is different.

Once again, assume the most favorable scenario.

The medication works.

The physician recommends it correctly.

The patient understands the information.

And refuses it.

The same problem then reappears:

what turns a correct therapeutic indication into authority to intervene physically against refusal?

When the person genuinely lacks capacity, an additional problem arises that requires specific rules.

When the person retains capacity, the tension with bodily sovereignty is much more direct.

10. From coercion toward a rights-based paradigm

Alternatives to substituted decision-making

A critique of coercion does not require defending abandonment.

That is a false dichotomy.

There are mechanisms designed precisely to increase a person's participation during a crisis:

• advance planning;
• psychiatric advance directives;
• community support;
• supported decision-making;
• trusted persons chosen in advance;
• procedures for review and participation.

So-called self-binding directives are a particularly complex case. A systematic review published in The Lancet Psychiatry found arguments both for and against them: arguments in favor included autonomy, harm reduction, and possible reduction of coercion; arguments against included risks to autonomy itself, difficulties involving capacity and implementation, and possible harms (Stephenson et al., 2023).

They should therefore not be presented naively as a purely non-coercive solution.

What matters is that models exist which seek to preserve the person's will and preferences rather than immediately assuming substituted decision-making.

The shift toward a rights-based paradigm

This debate has also acquired an international human-rights dimension.

The Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities places autonomy, equality, and legal capacity among its central principles. The Committee on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities has developed an especially demanding interpretation of Article 12 concerning equal recognition before the law and supported decision-making.

An important legal qualification is necessary here.

The Committee's interpretations do not automatically equal the domestic law in force in every country. There remains a substantial gap between these positions and many national legal systems, which continue to authorize involuntary hospitalization or treatment under particular conditions.

But doctrinally the position is notably strong.

The World Health Organization and the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights took another important step in 2023. Their joint guidance, Mental Health, Human Rights and Legislation: Guidance and Practice, proposes reforms aimed at eliminating coercion in mental-health services—including involuntary hospitalization, forced treatment, seclusion, and restraint—and placing free and informed consent and support models at the center of care (WHO & OHCHR, 2023).

For that reason, criticism of coercive psychiatry can no longer be dismissed simply as an eccentricity of twentieth-century “antipsychiatry.”

There is now an international institutional current that directly questions coercion and proposes replacing models centered on substituted will with systems based on autonomy, support, and rights.

11. The fundamental problem: turning knowledge into jurisdiction

After moving through political philosophy, medical sociology, bioethics, and psychiatry, the central problem can be stated quite simply.

Medicine possesses specialized knowledge.

That knowledge produces legitimate epistemic authority.

Society can institutionalize that authority through professions, hospitals, and regulatory systems.

Up to this point, there is not necessarily a problem.

The danger appears when the sequence continues:

specialized knowledge → professional authority → institutional jurisdiction → substituted decision-making → coercion.

There is another possible sequence:

specialized knowledge → information → recommendation → patient decision → consented treatment.

The difference between the two is not how much the physician knows.

It is who retains the final word.

This explains why effectiveness does not by itself resolve the debate.

An intervention may be scientifically correct and still be politically problematic.

It may produce benefit and still violate autonomy.

It may be motivated by good intentions and still concentrate too much power.

Institutional limits are not necessary only because malicious people exist.

They are necessary precisely because people convinced that they are doing good can also exceed their legitimate authority.

12. Medicine as a tool of the individual

Medicine has produced some of the greatest advances in human history. Precisely for that reason, it deserves a serious theory of its limits.

There is no contradiction between valuing medical knowledge and distrusting its transformation into coercive power.

Medicine oriented toward the individual should increase that person's ability to understand the situation, compare alternatives, and decide.

Autonomy requires accepting an uncomfortable consequence: other adults will make choices we regard as mistaken.

Some will in fact be mistaken.

Some will cause harm.

Some might have produced better outcomes if someone else had decided for them.

But if the mere possibility of a harmful decision were enough to transfer authority over a person, individual sovereignty would have very little substance.

Several distinctions therefore need to remain clear: knowledge is not jurisdiction; beneficence is not coercive legitimacy; diagnosis is not incapacity; risk is not incapacity; persuasion is not imposition; and caring about someone is not the same as being sovereign over that person.

Coercive psychiatry deserves especially demanding scrutiny because it can concentrate authority over diagnosis, capacity, liberty, treatment, and the interpretation of the individual's own conduct.

This does not prove that every involuntary intervention is necessarily illegitimate.

It does mean that no intervention should be treated as legitimate merely because it has been labeled medical, therapeutic, or protective.

The burden of justification should fall on whoever seeks to override another person's will.

And that burden should rise in proportion to the intensity of the intervention into liberty, bodily integrity, and autonomy.

Medicine probably reaches its greatest legitimacy when it places its knowledge at the service of the person.

It becomes far more difficult to justify when it turns that knowledge into a title of sovereignty over the person.

References and sources

1. Mill, John Stuart. On Liberty (1859). Project Gutenberg. https://www.gutenberg.org/files/34901/34901-h/34901-h.htm 2. Dworkin, Gerald. “Paternalism”. Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/paternalism/ 3. Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. “Coercion”. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/coercion/ 4. Illich, Ivan. Medical Nemesis: The Expropriation of Health (1975). 5. Illich, Ivan. “The Medicalization of Life” (1975). https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC1154458/ 6. Conrad, Peter. “Medicalization and Social Control”. Annual Review of Sociology 18 (1992): 209–232. https://www.annualreviews.org/doi/10.1146/annurev.so.18.080192.001233 7. Zola, Irving K. “Medicine as an Institution of Social Control”. The Sociological Review (1972). https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1467-954X.1972.tb00220.x 8. Freidson, Eliot. Profession of Medicine: A Study of the Sociology of Applied Knowledge (1970). 9. Chieze, Marie; Clavien, Christine; Kaiser, Stefan; Hurst, Samia. “Coercive Measures in Psychiatry: A Review of Ethical Arguments”. Frontiers in Psychiatry 12 (2021): 790886. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyt.2021.790886 10. Szasz, Thomas. “The Case Against Psychiatric Coercion”. The Independent Review 1(4) (1997): 485–498. https://www.independent.org/tir/1997-spring/the-case-against-psychiatric-coercion/ 11. Szasz, Thomas. Law, Liberty and Psychiatry (1963). 12. Steinert, Tilman. “Ethics of Coercive Treatment and Misuse of Psychiatry”. Psychiatric Services 68(3) (2017): 291–294. https://doi.org/10.1176/appi.ps.201600066 13. Hudson, Harry. “Coercion in Psychiatry: Is It Right to Involuntarily Treat Inpatients with Capacity?” Journal of Medical Ethics 45(11) (2019): 742–745. https://doi.org/10.1136/medethics-2019-105357 14. Fricker, Miranda. Epistemic Injustice: Power and the Ethics of Knowing (2007). 15. Crichton, Paul; Carel, Havi; Kidd, Ian James. “Epistemic Injustice in Psychiatry”. BJPsych Bulletin 41(2) (2017): 65–70. https://doi.org/10.1192/pb.bp.115.050682 16. Goffman, Erving. Asylums: Essays on the Social Situation of Mental Patients and Other Inmates (1961). 17. Sugiura, Kanna; Pertega, Elvira; Holmberg, Christopher. “Experiences of Involuntary Psychiatric Admission Decision-Making: A Systematic Review and Meta-Synthesis of the Perspectives of Service Users, Informal Carers, and Professionals”. International Journal of Law and Psychiatry 73 (2020): 101645. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijlp.2020.101645 18. Ranieri, Veronica et al. “Caregivers' Perceptions of Coercion in Psychiatric Hospital Admission”. Psychiatry Research 228(3) (2015): 380–385. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.psychres.2015.05.079 19. Moncrieff, Joanna; Cohen, David. “Rethinking Models of Psychotropic Drug Action”. Psychotherapy and Psychosomatics 74(3) (2005): 145–153. https://doi.org/10.1159/000083999 20. Stephenson, Lucy; Gieselmann, Astrid; Gergel, Tania; Owen, Gareth; Gather, Jakov; Scholten, Matthé. “Self-binding Directives in Psychiatric Practice: A Systematic Review of Reasons”. The Lancet Psychiatry 10 (2023): 887–895. https://doi.org/10.1016/S2215-0366(23)00221-3 21. United Nations. Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities. https://www.ohchr.org/en/instruments-mechanisms/instruments/convention-rights-persons-disabilities 22. Committee on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities. General Comment No. 1 (2014), Article 12: Equal Recognition before the Law. https://www.ohchr.org/en/documents/general-comments-and-recommendations/general-comment-no-1-article-12-equal-recognition-1 23. World Health Organization & Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights. Mental Health, Human Rights and Legislation: Guidance and Practice (2023). https://www.who.int/publications/i/item/9789240080737

Related reading on Libertatis Venezuela

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