Mapping the psychiatric circuit: Mental health law and psychiatric carcerality in the ‘post-institutional’ era

This paper theorises psychiatric carcerality after the shift in the locus of control from incarceration in large-scale institutions to psychiatric treatment in ‘the community’. It draws on the findings of an Australian study into experiences of Community Treatment Orders, civil orders under mental health legislation authoring forced psychiatric treatment in the home. It conceptualises Community Treatment Orders as a node within a broader psychiatric circuit, in which patients constructed as ‘risky’ are governed through enlistment into routinised, coerced movements across the circuit. I explore how psychiatric carcerality in the ‘post-institutional’ era operates through both immobility and movement across the psychiatric circuit, and the circuit's role as a threshold to other carceral systems and spaces.<p></p>