New mental health law would change hospitalization rules. Experts say people’s rights could suffer

The government has filed a bill aimed at reforming Argentina’s 2010 mental health law. The proposal includes a provision aimed at loosening norms that currently restrict involuntary hospitalizations of people with mental health conditions. According to the national government, it will simplify the process of hospitalizing people in high-risk situations “in order to prevent homicides, suicides, and assaults on others resulting from the inability to receive timely and appropriate treatment.” The topic is at the center of a debate within the mental health community.  Those backing the reform say it will make it easier to hospitalize people who represent a danger to themselves and others, which is currently limited to cases of imminent risk. Critics, on the other hand, state this would go against the individual’s rights and move back towards a system focused on institutionalization, seeing mental health conditions as a disease that must be cured.  “There is a mental health epidemic, and this reform will not solve that. It will be a huge setback,” said psychologist and lecturer Daniela Gasparini, adding that mental health treatment prior to 2010 was far from ideal. “They were locked up and, far from getting better, they got worse and worse.” The current law The 2010 law has a strong focus on human rights and limited involuntary institutionalizations to critical situations in which risk is “concrete and imminent” — meaning the person has to be actively threatening their life or others for a team of professionals to sign an admittance form. The law also banned the creation of new mental health facilities, instead promoting providing mental health care in general hospitals and adapting existing ones to become general-care facilities to avoid stigmatization. Relatives of individuals experiencing mental health challenges have questioned the law on the grounds that it makes it difficult for their loved ones to get the help they need. This is because the law states that people cannot be hospitalized without their consent, which critics say means that families and friends are left waiting for a high-risk situation to happen. Gasparini, a former head of a government agency dedicated to fighting and preventing human trafficking, told the Herald that the law prior to 2010 led to “many abuses and suppression of rights,” including “compulsory hospitalizations.” “It was very common to admit people because their relatives asked for it. People were not only compulsively medicated but also overmedicated,” Gasparini said.  The changes The reform proposes that, instead of only being able to order involuntary hospitalizations upon imminent risk, professionals be allowed to do so when there is “serious risk of harm to the life or physical integrity” of the person or others. The decision may also be made taking into account previous harmful actions or ideations. Another consideration will also be potential future actions the person may engage in based on their mental health history, which could lead to “undesirable consequences” if not attended to in a healthcare facility. This means that the decision would not solely depend on the actions or symptoms the person is manifesting at the time of the clinical and psychological evaluation. According to the government, the goal is to establish a “broader and more clarifying term” to what situations merit involuntary hospitalization so that there are “no situations of doubt or inaction on behalf of the professionals resulting from difficulties interpreting” the norm. You may also be interested in: The Argentines are not all right: Therapists reflect on a growing mental health crisis While currently involuntary hospitalizations can be ordered by any member of the evaluating team — which may include psychiatrists, psychologists, social workers, and nurses — the reform bill proposes that a psychiatrist must always be present and sign the admittance form. This aims to “give a central role to the technical-medical point of view” for policies on mental health and substance abuse by giving more prevalence to psychiatrists. In addition, the reform proposes eliminating the ban on the creation of mental health facilities in order to create new ones. While the current law stated that existing facilities should have been shut down in 2020, this never happened. Another change would be that the wording used for mental health conditions would go from “affection” to “disorder,” which is the term used by the World Health Organization. “This is a change in discourse that is not merely verbal; it has to do with an ideological conception,” Gasparini said. Mixed reactions Ricardo Corral, head of the Argentine Psychiatrists’ Association, who works at public mental health facility Hospital Borda, said the reform is necessary because the current law “had a positive goal” of protecting people’s rights, but “it ended up having the opposite effect and left many people on their own.” “The current law establishes hospitalization should be a last resort and only when there is ‘certain and imminent risk,’” Corral told Radio Post, questioning that term because “human behavior is unpredictable, and many times risk is not immediate but potential.” “Today, an adult can simply say, ‘I don’t want to be hospitalized,’ and they won’t. Families are suffering because of this law.” Social worker and mental health activist Marina Charpentier — mother of pop star Chano Charpentier, who struggled with substance abuse in the past decade — said the current law is “idyllic” and called for changes. “It may sound interesting on paper, but everything the law says does not really exist,” she said, a week before the government filed its reform bill. In 2025, there was a 77% increase in mental health hospitalizations and a 134% rise in demand for mental health services. While the 2010 law established that the national state should progressively increase its mental health funding to 10% of its overall health budget, this never happened.  The current national budget for mental health is at 1.4% of the overall funding. The reform proposal eliminates this funding threshold, meaning that Argentina would no longer have a minimum budget for mental health. “Without funding, no law can work. We need to change management, not the law,” Buenos Aires province Health Minister Nicolás Kreplak said in an Instagram post rejecting the reform. Last week, health authorities from 18 provinces rejected the reform proposal during a meeting, saying that it is “a setback in terms of rights as it removes key sources of essential funding, sets new access barriers to attention in situations of emergency and hospitalization, and dismantles the community focus present in the current law.” While the complaints made by families of people with mental health conditions are “genuine,” Gasparini said, “they have nothing to do with current law but rather with the lack of support available to those affected and their families, which is what the current law states but has never been implemented.”