Name: Still called a lunatic: mental health law as structural harm in a small island state
Start: 2026-10-08T10:00:00-0500
End: 2026-10-08T11:00:00-0500

Beyond Borders: Global Collaborations for Mental Health Research and Services Conference

Still called a lunatic: mental health law as structural harm in a small island state

Thursday October 8, 2026 10:00am - 11:00am CDT

In St Kitts and Nevis, a person experiencing a mental health crisis can still be legally described as a lunatic. They can be ordered into confinement by a magistrate, without legal representation, without the right to be present at the hearing, and without any guarantee of treatment. The law that permits this is the Lunacy and Mental Treatment Act 1956 — a colonial statute that has never been replaced, amended in any meaningful way, or aligned with the constitutional rights that independence promised.

This impact story traces what that gap looks like in practice. A young man with schizophrenia kills his grandmother during a psychotic episode. The judge at sentencing acknowledges that imprisonment is the wrong response — that what is needed is psychiatric care in a secure facility with structured review. He sentences the man to twenty-one years anyway, because no other legal option exists. This is not a failure of individual compassion. It is the predictable output of a legal system built for a different era, operating on a different understanding of what a person with mental illness is: not a patient, not a rights-bearer, but a subject for confinement.

Drawing on two years of legal research into the mental health framework of St Kitts and Nevis, this presentation argues that colonial mental health law is itself a form of structural inequity — one that compounds scarcity of services with scarcity of rights. It explores what resilience means when the law works against you, and what a rights-based, therapeutically grounded framework could look like for a small island state with limited resources but profound constitutional obligations.

Speakers

Micheleina Charles-Hazelle

Second Year Law Student, University of the West Indies St. Augustine Law Student

Micheleina Charles-Hazelle is an LLB (Hons) candidate at the Faculty of Law, University of the West Indies, St Augustine, where she balances full-time study alongside her role as primary caregiver to her mother, who lives with a mental health condition. A national of St Kitts and... Read More →

Thursday October 8, 2026 10:00am - 11:00am CDT

Social Determinants

global Y

Beyond Borders: Global Mental Health Conference

Micheleina Charles-Hazelle

Get help with the event

Beyond Borders: Global Mental Health Conference

Micheleina Charles-Hazelle

Log in to save this to your schedule, view media, leave feedback and see who's attending!

Get help with the event