Identity, law, policy and Communicating Mental Health

This paper reflects on the special edition, Communicating Mental Health, from the perspective of a legal academic with an interest in the service user rights and in United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities. It is argued that the special edition demonstrates the breadth of the medical model but also that the medical model remains firmly in place in academic understanding of mental disability. The paper questions what this means for identity formation of people with lived experience of mental disability and how we should conceptualise mental disability in the future.