AUTHOR COPY Original Article Therapeutic governmentality and biopower in a Canadian mental health court Anne Nordberg School of Social Work, The University of Texas at Arlington, 211 S. Cooper Street, Arlington, Texas TX 76019, USA. E-mail: annenordberg@uta.edu This article is an adaptation of the author’s dissertation entitled “The Impact of Therapeutic Jurisprudence: A Critical Study of Toronto’s Mental Health Court” available at deepblue.lib.umich.edu/handle/2027.42/99817. Abstract Mental health courts (MHCs) are a response to the structural violence experienced by people with severe mental illness (SMI) involved in the criminal justice system. My ethnographic research of an MHC in urban Canada serves as the foundation for a discussion of court processes that are an example of biopower. The purpose of this article is to demonstrate how strategies for intervention in the name of life and health, truth discourses and forms of self-governance operate among criminal justice-involved individuals with SMI. This study reveals the tensions between the intense forensic gaze and invisibility and between treatment strategies that are beneficial for some people with SMI yet ultimately coercive and oppressive. The governance of this population is dis- cussed, as well as what happens to people who fail or refuse to self-govern as the court compels them. BioSocieties advance online publication, 26 October 2015; doi:10.1057/biosoc.2015.36 Keywords: biopower; governmentality; mental health court; structural violence; invisibility; people with severe mental illness Introduction The purpose of this article is to offer a contemporary example of biopower that demonstrates how strategies for intervention in the name of life and health, truth discourses and forms of self-governance (Rabinow and Rose, 2006) operate among criminal justice-involved indivi- duals with severe mental illness (SMI). This study reveals the tensions between the intense forensic gaze and invisibility and between treatment strategies that are beneficial for some people with SMI yet ultimately coercive. My ethnographic research of a mental health court (MHC) in urban Canada serves as the foundation for a discussion of court processes that are an example of biopower. I will argue that the technologies of power and technologies of self 1 1 Technologies of power and technologies of self are two of the four technologies identified by Foucault et al (1988, p. 18) that are instrumental for people to govern themselves. © 2015 Macmillan Publishers Ltd. 1745-8552 BioSocieties 1–22 www.palgrave-journals.com/biosoc/