Integrating Mediation into India's Mental Healthcare: A Comparative Legal Analysis

Abstract

Mental healthcare in India is undergoing a paradigm shift, illustrated by the Mental Healthcare Act, 2017, which moves from a custodial to a rights-based approach. The legislation protects people with mental illnesses, safeguarding their autonomy and their dignity and promoting non-discrimination. It also creates significant legal, ethical, and medical quandaries in cases of involuntary treatment, institutional care, and guardianship, disputes that sometimes encompass highly charged clashes among family members, patients, and mental health experts. Within this growing framework, mediation, an integral part of alternative dispute resolution (ADR), emerges as a potentially transformative mechanism for resolving conflicts with sensitivity and equity. Despite ADR’s proven success in civil and family law matters, its integration into the domain of mental health jurisprudence in India remains highly underexplored. This paper analyses the sources and reasons for conflict in India’s mental healthcare systems. It assesses the absence of institutionalised ADR mechanisms in the Mental Healthcare Act, 2017, and proposes a rights-based model of therapeutic jurisprudence that combines legal safeguards with clinical realities. It explores the potential for coordinated and structured mediation processes within mental healthcare systems, drawing upon comparative models from jurisdictions such as the United Kingdom and Australia, and proposes a hybrid dispute resolution model in which mediation is embedded as a mandatory pre-adjudication step within the Mental Healthcare Act framework. By adopting a rights-sensitive, therapeutically informed mediation framework, India can move from a fragmented and adversarial system to one that truly embodies dignity, autonomy, and collaborative care.