Article Text
Abstract
Objectives: To explore mental health service users’ views of existing and proposed compulsory powers.
Design: A qualitative study employing in-depth interviews. Participants were asked to respond to hypothetical questions regarding the application of compulsory powers under the Mental Health Act 1983 for people other than themselves.
Setting: Community setting in Southeast England.
Participants: Mental health service users subject to Supervised Discharge/Guardianship.
Results: Participants considered that the use of compulsory powers was justified if there were some ultimate benefit, and if there was evidence of mental health problems, dangerousness, or a lack of insight. However, participants rejected intrusions into their autonomy and privacy.
Conclusions: This paper’s participants indicated that the proposed CTO may be unacceptable because it would threaten service users’ autonomy. Service users’ acceptance of proposed changes is conditional and they emphasised the importance of consent; there is no suggestion that consent will be required for the CTO. The findings also have implications for the exploration of mental health service users’ views and how they might contribute to policy, service planning, and research.
- CTO, Community Treatment Order
- MHA, Mental Health Act
- autonomy
- consent
- compulsory community mental health care
- ethics
- mental health service users’ views
Statistics from Altmetric.com
Read the full text or download the PDF:
Other content recommended for you
- Community treatment orders and associations with readmission rates and duration of psychiatric hospital admission: a controlled electronic case register study
- Improving the experience of care for adults using NHS mental health services: summary of NICE guidance
- Evaluating the effects of community treatment orders (CTOs) in England using the Mental Health Services Dataset (MHSDS): protocol for a national, population-based study
- Exploring goal planning in mental health service delivery: a systematic review protocol
- Exploration of recovery of people living with severe mental illness (SMI) in low/middle-income countries (LMICs): a scoping review
- Realist Evaluation of the Use of Patient Experience Data to Improve the Quality of Inpatient Mental Health Care (EURIPIDES) in England: study protocol
- Developing a core outcome set for interventions to improve discharge from mental health inpatient services: a survey, Delphi and consensus meeting with key stakeholder groups
- Epistemic injustice, children and mental illness
- Improving mental healthcare access and experience for people from minority ethnic groups: an England-wide multisite experience-based codesign (EBCD) study
- Is supervised community treatment ethically justifiable?