Home - Centre for Mental Health, Human Rights and Social Justice

The Centre for Mental Health, Human Rights, and Social Justice is a multi-institutional platform dedicated to the study of rights-based approaches to mental health law, policy, and practices. The Centre serves as an accountability hub, using human rights discourse to challenge and critique the status quo in mental health. As an independent and multi-disciplinary collective of scholars and activists, our aim is to promote a transformative and decolonised vision of mental health that centers the lived experience of directly-impacted people.

Our work

The Centre’s work revolves around four thematic areas: mental health futures, policy, research, and dialogue.

Mad Thinking

Mad Thinking is a knowledge development and exchange initiative dedicated to produce, systematise and disseminate user/survivor and critical research to advance the rights and inclusion of persons with psychosocial disabilities, including users, survivors and mad persons, across international and national agendas.

(Un)Mapping Global Health

This research project, both participatory and co-designed with individuals with lived experience, will make important interventions within GMH, and the fields of global health and medical sociology more broadly, by disentangling the intricate networks and assemblages that make up Global Mental Health.

Dialogues

The Handover Dialogues documents the legacy of work produced by Dr. Dainius Pūras, who became the first medical doctor to be appointed Special Rapporteur on the right to physical and mental health. In 2020, Dr. Pūras ended his tenure with the appointment of Tlaleng Mofokeng, another historic appointment as the first woman and first person from the global South to hold this post.

Housing in Brazil

The Centre is working with the Brazilian Ministry of Human Rights and Citizenship to facilitate the development of a national Housing First policy which will place human rights at the forefront of addressing the needs of chronically homeless individuals, including those with psycho-social disabilities.

"Good mental health and well-being cannot be defined by the absence of a mental health condition, but must be defined instead by the social, psychosocial, political, economic and physical environment that enables individuals and populations to live a life of dignity, with full enjoyment of their rights and in the equitable pursuit of their potential"

- Dainius Pūras

About us

The Centre for Mental Health, Human Rights, and Social Justice was founded in 2020 as a response to the work of Dr. Dainius Pūras during his time as United Nations Special Rapporteur on the right to the enjoyment of the highest attainable standard physical and mental health, where he used a right to health framework to advocate for a paradigm shift in how we understand and respond to mental health.

We are an independent and multi-disciplinary global community of scholars and activists dedicated to the study of rights-based approaches to mental health law, policy, and practices.

Building on Dr. Puras’ legacy, we aim to promote a transformative and decolonised vision of mental health that centers the lived experience of directly-impacted people.

As a policy and research hub, we challenge status quo policies and practices in the mental health field while actively providing solutions for reform. We collaborate and work with individuals who have lived experience and/or identify as having a psychosocial disability.