Keep an Eye on, Control and Treat: Consent to Care at the Quebec Review Board
Objectives The right to refuse care for accused persons found criminally not responsible on account of mental disorder or unfit to stand trial is recognized and strictly regulated by the legal mechanisms of Quebec civil law, and Canadian criminal law does not allow them to be treated against their will. Review Boards, which are responsible for ruling on and periodically re-evaluating their situation, cannot prescribe treatment, but have the authority, with the consent of the accused, to impose a condition relating to treatment. The purpose of this ethnographic study is to document the discourse and practices of the Quebec Review Board in this area. Method The research material consists of observations from the hearings of the Quebec Review Board (n = 70), file observation grids completed by defense lawyers (n = 191), interviews with psychiatrists (n = 7) and defense lawyers (n = 7) and the study of one hundred court decisions from 2018, randomly selected. Results Our study shows that the practices of the Quebec Review Board make it possible, directly or indirectly, through the ambiguity of conditions or the pressure exerted by certain treatment teams, to override the accused’s refusal of care and to impose treatment. The implications of these findings for the evolution of knowledge and practices in forensic psychiatry are discussed. Conclusion While the Review Boards are supposed to manage the risk to public safety, they are in fact, in the context of the State’s disengagement in social matters, exercising surveillance and control, in particular via the conditions relating to treatment.