EViPRG launches a Living Taxonomy of Coercion in Mental Health Care

What Counts as Coercion? Building a Living Taxonomy for Mental Health Care

What counts as coercion in mental health care - and do we all mean the same thing when we use the term?

Across the world, different legal frameworks, healthcare culture, research definitions and lived experiences shape how coercion is understood, recognised and reported. Formal practices such as involuntary treatment, restraint and seclusion may be readily identified as coercive in some contexts, while informal, relational and less visible forms of coercion remain inconsistently defined - or may not be recognised at all.

Members of EViPRG are developing a Living Taxonomy of Coercion in Mental Health Care (Richter, Haines-Delmont, et al., 2026). The project aims to work towards a clearer and more shared understanding of coercion across mental health care, while recognising that legislation, terminology and the application of coercive practices differ substantially between countries and contexts.

Crucially, the taxonomy is intended to be living rather than static. The EViPRG website will provide a space to share the developing taxonomy and its evidence base, invite feedback and challenge from researchers, practitioners and people with lived experience, and transparently update the framework as new evidence, perspectives and practices emerge.

In the coming months, we will publish the first version of our evidence database as an accessible Excel/CSV dataset, marking the beginning of the taxonomy's public, living phase. We hope that sharing the underpinning evidence openly will encourage discussion, help us identify gaps and missing perspectives, and support the ongoing validation and refinement of the taxonomy.

The developing taxonomy will also be presented and discussed at the EViPRG Congress in Antwerp on 5- 6 November 2026. We invite the EViPRG community to engage with the project and help us ask a deceptively simple but fundamental question: what counts as coercion in mental health care?

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