Abstract
This commentary refers to: When Treatment Pressures Become Coercive: A Context-Sensitive Model of Informal Coercion in Mental Healthcare https://doi.org/10.1080/15265161.2023.2232754
Hempeler et al. (2024) provide convincing reasons for why we should view a broad set of treatment pressures as coercive. They’re correct that in order for us to understand the ways in which patients can be coerced, as opposed to encouraged or convinced into accepting treatment, we must attend to the context in which patients find themselves. In doing so they’ve identified an interesting and ethically significant shortcoming in Szmukler and Appelbaum’s canonical account of coercion in mental health care (2008).