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This page is an AI-assisted Turkish summary of the study presented at the 26th World Congress of Psychiatry. The study belongs to the presenting authors; please refer to the original source when citing it.

How does criminal law relate to psychiatric diagnoses and psychiatry’s concepts of mental illness?

How the criminal law relates to psychiatric diagnoses and psychiatry’s concepts of mental illness

Psychiatric diagnoses and symptoms, which were not developed for the purposes of criminal law, play a decisive role in assessing defendants’ criminal responsibility and in special legal measures aimed at preventing reoffending, raising serious concerns about human rights and equal treatment.

The talk examines how defendants with mental health conditions are treated differently from other defendants worldwide and explores the interaction between law and psychiatry in this context. It focuses on an issue that transcends jurisdictions: the legal implications of psychiatry’s concepts of mental disorder in practice. Psychiatric diagnoses and symptoms were not developed for the purposes of criminal law, and their legal significance in practice remains largely unclear. Nevertheless, they appear to play an important role both in how criminal law understands these defendants’ responsibility and in the application of special legal measures aimed at preventing reoffending. These special legal regimes raise serious concerns, including the risk of human rights violations and unequal treatment before the law. The legal position of children with mental health conditions presents additional, distinctive challenges. Drawing on comparative and cross-national research, the speaker discusses these challenges and outlines possible future directions for addressing them.

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