This book provides a detailed overview of the legal basis of a hotly debated and highly criticized field of mental health care: coercive treatment measures in adult psychiatry. The detailed compilation of national regulations concerning these measures uses a standardized format across the chapters. They are comprised of the relevant laws and general norms, protocols and internal norms, major sentences set down by judicial bodies, reports of organizations reviewing best practice, and national safeguarding systems. Furthermore, similarities and differences between the country-specific situations as well as important future perspectives are comparatively assessed from a legal and clinical point of view. Standards that should be set in order to harmonize the legal situation on this theme across Europe are outlined. As such, this book deals with a human rights issue that has so far not been thoroughly explored within the context of reforming mental health care provision across Europe in the last decades: the quality of care for persons involuntarily admitted to psychiatric facilities, a population at risk of having their autonomy, freedom, dignity, and human rights infringed upon.

The Editors: Thomas W. Kallert is head of the Dresden mental health services research group, co-ordinator of the EC-funded «EUNOMIA»-project on coercion in psychiatry, and Professor of Psychiatry at the Dresden University of Technology. Francisco Torres-González is director of the Andalusian mental health services research group, co-ordinator of the MARISTAN-network, head of the Department of Psychiatry/Legal Medicine, and Professor of Psychiatry at the University of Granada (Spain).