Mental Disability between Vulnerable Subjectivity and Social Control. The Case of Mental Illness

Disability has become an increasing subject of concern under the legal and political contemporary debate. In this context, many scholars have focused the problem of the legal qualification of the disability subject as a topic connected to the European case law on the vulnerable groups. Especially in the EHCR's decisions, mental disability has often been considered as a special case on which the Judges have grounded a "social" model of vulnerability even if, for mental illness, quite different are the perspectives emerging from the European case law. The different considerations of mental disability enable us to face the structural ambiguity of the category, because of the distinct capabilities of the subjects involved in it. In this article, after some brief historical references on law and psychiatry, the Author discusses the condition of the subject affected by mental disorder under the main institutional issues regarding the legal perspective, between individual protection and social control.