Piers Gooding - Psychosocial Disability Rights and Digital Mental Health

Piers Gooding is a Mozilla Foundation fellow (2020) and researcher at the Melbourne Social Equity Institute at the University of Melbourne Law School. His main interests are disability law and policy, international human rights law, the law and politics of mental health, and empirical legal research.

Gooding describes his scholarship as an interdisciplinary undertaking that blends theoretical inquiry with applied qualitative research at the local, national, and international levels. He has collaborated with the UN Special Rapporteur for the Rights of Persons with Disabilities and the World Psychiatric Association on recommendations for alternatives to coercion in mental health. He blogs at https://pgooding.substack.com/ and tweets at @p_gooding.

In this interview, he discusses his journey pursuing a human rights agenda in mental health. We focus on his efforts to marry international human rights law and the work of disability rights committees to ensure that people with psychosocial disabilities are not left out. He then talks about his longstanding work to prevent coercion in mental health and its connection to the digital, data-driven direction taken by the field as a whole. He elaborates the regulatory and ethical issues he has uncovered in his research at the intersection of mental health services and data-driven technologies and gestures at emerging methods of “algorithmic accountability” for addressing some of these issues.