Elyn Saks
Politico - The Agenda
Originally published August 9, 2017
Patient consent is an important principle in medicine, but when it comes to mental illness, things get complicated. Other diseases don’t affect a patient’s cognition the way a mental illness can. When the organ with the disease is a patient’s brain, how can it be trusted to make decisions?
That’s one reason that, historically, psychiatric patients were given very little authority to make decisions about their own care. Mental illness and incompetence were considered the same thing. People could be hospitalized and treated against their will if they were considered mentally ill and “in need of treatment.” The presumption was that people with mental illness—essentially by definition—lacked the ability to appreciate their own need for treatment.
In the 1970s, the situation began to change. First, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that a patient could be hospitalized against his will only if he were dangerous to himself or others, or “gravely disabled,” a decision that led to the de-institutionalization of most mental health care. Second, anti-psychotic medications came into wide use, effectively handing patients the power—on a daily basis—to decide whether to consent to treatment or not, simply by deciding whether or not to take their pills.
The article is here.
