Spinning the Revolving Door: The Governance of Resistant Psychiatric Subjects on Community Treatment Orders

• In Event: 573 - Section on Sociology of Mental Health Paper Session. Law, Crime and Mental Illness

Abstract

This paper examines the discourse surrounding the enactment of community treatment orders (CTOs) in Alberta, Canada to illustrate how the civil law is used to constitute and govern psychiatric patients in the community. This paper focuses on four themes: rationality, harm, competence, and choice. I argue that the logic of CTOs constitutes the psychiatric patient as a fractured subject who is simultaneously competent/incompetent and at risk/risky. These paradoxical characterizations highlight how depictions of rationality, choice, and the perceived competence to make responsible choices are contingent on consenting to a pharmacological regime designed to normalize psychiatric patients. This narrow construction of competence and agency eliminates opportunities for rationally informed types of resistance and promotes hospitalization as the only way to manage harmful, risky, and resistant individuals. I contend that CTOs are a flawed instrument of regulation that cannot effectively manage ‘legally’ competent but resistant individuals in the community and as such it continues to spin the revolving door rather than close it.

Author

• Amy Lynn Klassen, University of Toronto