On coercion and consent:Rearranging regulations in mental-health practices (CONTRAST)

ANR contract (2013-2016) | Cermes3
Coordinators: Livia Velpry, Cermes3; Benoit Eyraud, Lyon2/Centre MaxWeber

In the past few decades, the legal, administrative, and ethical rules governing professional care practices have given the principle of consent greater importance in the health, social, and medical-social sectors.This evolution has changed the forms taken by coercion in care and the significance of its practice.These rearrangements in the framework of care practices affect the jurisdictional authorities that formulate and officially apply the principles, as well as affect the actors-in-situation facing moral dilemmas that they solve discreetly.These changes redistribute the boundaries between practices that are valued and those related to the “dirty work” and in doing so, raise important social issues at the intersection of civic concern for individual freedom and more social civic concern for the protection of individuals.

To clarify these issues, the CONTRAST project analyzes the regulations of care practices across different sectors of public action by observing how the various formalized, legal, ethical, and professional-ethics rules highlighting the principle of consent in care practices are applied, or not, in concrete situation.

We make the assumption that these regulations exist not only in the jurisdictional formulation of principles, but also in the ways of accounting for or discretely maintaining the forms of coercion entailed by care practices.To develop this assumption, the project articulates an original theoretical approach to regulations with an extended comparison of care practices in contrasted legal and ethical contexts.