Two mental health and mental disability conferences for your diary

A heads-up about two really interesting conferences in the field of mental health and mental disability law for 2018.

One is the annual Socio-Legal Studies Association conference at the University of Bristol, 27-29 March 2018, which will again have a stream devoted to mental health and mental capacity law, organized by Professor Peter Bartlett (Nottingham) and Amanda Keeling (Leeds). The call for papers, registration etc may be found at the conference website. The initial deadline for the call for papers is 8 January 2018.

The other is the Second UK Mental Disability Law Conference, to be held at Nottingham on 26 and 27 June 2018.  Unlike the SLSA, this is a specific conference devoted to mental disability law (including issues relating to mental health/psychosocial disability, learning disability, disabilities associated with old age and mental capacity). The conference targets academics, practitioners, policymakers, advocates and people with lived experience.  As in the previous conference in 2016, the aim is that people with lived experience will constitute at least half of the plenary speakers, and one fifth of the people attending. This conference is hosted jointly by the School of Law at the University of Nottingham and the Institute of Mental Health, with the endorsement of the Human Rights Law Centre at the University of Nottingham.  The Nottingham conference will combine plenary and breakout sessions.  This year’s plenaries will be:

  • What do we Want from a New Mental Health Act?
  • The Effects of Austerity
  • The UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities: What is this ‘New Paradigm’?

The Nottingham conference organisers invite offers of papers for the breakout sessions from scholars of any discipline relevant to law and governance relating to mental disability (including psychosocial disabilities/mental health problems, learning disabilities, and dementia and related disorders of old age). There is no restriction on methodology:  papers may be empirical, policy-centred, historical, analytic, traditional legal, or theoretical, in approach.  For more details, to submit papers, see here.

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