Human rights and the governance of cognitive impairment and mental illness

During the 1970s and 1980s, western countries around the world entered a process of deinstitutionalization, releasing many people with cognitive impairments and mental illness from staterun institutions and asylums. Primarily this process occurred in response to both the emergence of rights-based disability movements (see Campbell and Oliver 1996), as well as subsequent rights-based challenges, such as the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Disabled Persons 1975 . Unfortunately, however, this process of deinstitutionalization failed on several fronts.