Today was the second day of the Disability Law Summer School at NUI Galway. I was pleased to hear from another panel of speakers this morning, this one on the topic of “Mad Studies”. One speaker who really reached out to me above the others was Cath Roper from the University of Melbourne in Australia. I put together my country profile on Australia, so I was very intrigued to hear if I would already know any of the information she presented or what she may present that I was not able to cover in my profile. Her presentation was entirely new to me, as I focused my research on intellectual a developmental disability in Australia and she has firsthand experience and conducts research on psychosocial disability in Australia. Ms. Roper introduced us to the term “hermeneutic injustice”, which was a hard concept for me to entirely understand but she described it as when a culture does not even have a concept in order to understand an individual’s experiences. Although she began with a difficult concept, the way that Ms. Roper built on this concept to make the points that she intended to helped me to understand her presentation and was quite enlightening. She explained that mental health legislation is a form of hermeneutic injustice because it typically views an individual’s “best interests” as what is medically best for them and not what they actually desire as an individual. Legal violence stemming from this issue can then easily lead to physical violence against individuals in the form of seclusion, take downs, and more. However, returning to the idea of “best interests”, these situations are not considered violence because they are considered to be in the best interest of the individual. Ms. Roper really opened my eyes to the difficulties and perpetuating cycles of violence against individuals with psychosocial disabilities. I also enjoyed how she included a piece on how we can reverse this cycle. She mentioned that categorizing individuals with psychosocial disabilities and labeling them causes people to make assumptions about these individuals. Ms. Roper encouraged creating a social context that is inclusion and encouraging of an individual’s autonomy. This presentation reached out to me originally because Ms. Roper was speaking from the Australian perspective and I was interested in comparing my knowledge with hers and enlightened me on the issue of a perpetuating cycle of how individuals with psychosocial disabilities are treated.