Epistemic Adequacy: A Ground for Human Rights in Psychiatry

Recent debates in global mental health reveal a persistent gap between normative commitments and clinical reality. This commentary engages with two recent contributions in International Journal of Law and Psychiatry—on CRPD indicators and on institutionalized ignorance in court—alongside parallel discussions in global health governance and artificial intelligence in psychiatry. It is argued that the limited progress in implementing human rights is not primarily due to insufficient ethical commitment, but to a structural misalignment between legal, clinical, and administrative modes of judgment. The paper proposes a shift from indicator-based compliance toward criteria of functional adequacy and cross-context consistency. Without restoring epistemic adequacy, both human rights frameworks and AI-driven tools risk reinforcing the institutional patterns they are intended to improve.