{"id":249395,"date":"2025-10-30T05:03:09","date_gmt":"2025-10-30T05:03:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/249395\/"},"modified":"2025-10-30T05:03:09","modified_gmt":"2025-10-30T05:03:09","slug":"researchers-map-the-new-geography-of-psychiatric-coercion","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/249395\/","title":{"rendered":"Researchers Map the New Geography of Psychiatric Coercion"},"content":{"rendered":"

A new\u00a0article<\/a> in Incarceration argues that involuntary community treatment can operate as a dispersed carceral system.<\/p>\n

Sociologist Panos Karanikolas maps what he calls the \u201cpsychiatric circuit,\u201d showing how Community Treatment Orders (CTOs) couple medication mandates with surveillance, coerced mobility, and routine police involvement.<\/p>\n

Drawing on interviews in Victoria, Australia, the paper describes a pattern in which people live outside hospitals yet remain governed through legal orders, check-ins, home visits, and the ever-present threat of recall to inpatient care.<\/p>\n

\u201cPsychiatric circuits\u2019 is my offering to abolitionist knowledge and discourse that seeks to understand and resist the full spectrum [of] carceral violence, including that which occurs within systems that exist ostensibly to deliver treatment and care,\u201d Karanikolas writes.
\nThe circuit, Karanikolas writes, \u201cplays a pivotal role in the wider carceral landscape and acts as a threshold to the criminalisation and policing of people deemed \u2018mentally ill\u2019.\u201d<\/p>\n

What looks like care, he argues, relies on \u201cpsychopharmaceuticals to sedate,\u201d \u201csurveillance and coerced mobility across a multiplicity of sites,\u201d and \u201ctranscarceral\u201d transfers into police and family-policing systems.<\/p>\n

CTOs, also called \u201cassisted outpatient treatment\u201d or \u201cmandatory outpatient committal,\u201d authorize forced psychotropic drug use (most often via long-acting depot injections) while a person lives in the community. They are now common in Australia, New Zealand, the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom, and are often presented as \u201cless restrictive\u201d than hospital detention. The article challenges that premise, arguing that CTOs embed carceral logics in ordinary settings and \u201cenlist patients into both punitive movement and immobilisation.\u201d<\/p>\n

The analysis lands at a politically charged moment. In July 2025, the White House issued an executive order urging expanded civil commitment as a homelessness response<\/a>, a step critics say conflates poverty and disability and risks more coercive psychiatry in the community. Several legal and policy groups warned the order would criminalize homelessness and encourage forced treatment in the name of public safety.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

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