These are the questions at the heart of Professor Emmanuelle Bernheim's new book, Therapeutic (In)justice and the Shadow Carceral State: An Ethnographic Study in Mental Health Courtrooms, published by Palgrave Macmillan.
Drawing on extensive ethnographic fieldwork conducted in four Quebec mental health courtrooms, the book offers a rare, firsthand examination of how courts shape the implementation of psychiatric coercion. By observing judicial proceedings and practices across multiple legal contexts, Professor Bernheim explores the gap between the procedural demands of the mental health justice system and the lived experiences of the people who pass through it.
Rather than examining legal doctrine alone, the book focuses on how the justice system operates in practice. It argues that organizational pressures, institutional cultures and paternalistic approaches to mental health can have a greater influence on judicial decision-making than the legal framework itself. In doing so, the book highlights how people living with mental illness may encounter multiple, overlapping forms of legal intervention while their own voices and experiences remain marginalized.
Through this cross-sectional analysis of mental health courtrooms, Professor Bernheim also examines the emergence of what she describes as a “mental health justice market,” where legal, medical and administrative systems intersect in ways that can reinforce social inequalities and expand psychiatric coercion.
By combining socio-legal analysis with ethnographic research, Therapeutic (In)justice and the Shadow Carceral State contributes to ongoing debates about mental health law, access to justice and the protection of fundamental rights. The book will be of interest to scholars and practitioners in law, sociology, psychology, psychiatry and social work, as well as anyone interested in the relationship between law, mental health and social justice.
Published in July 2026, the book is available in open access.