Abstract

Mental health is a complex phenomenon that affects both legal system and social representation related to people with mental suffering. Aware of the fact that the relationship between psychiatry and law is characterized by uncertainty, this essay aims to reconstruct the constellation of rights in the mental health field, examining, on the one hand, the informed consent issue as an expression of the person integry and, on the other hand, the vulnerability condition in which psychiatric patients are. Integrity and vulnerability describe the boundaries of the legal identity of people suffering from a psychiatric disorder, especially after the law 180/1978 that gave them full citizenship back.