Alliance policies: Treatment Safeguards
Some treatments for mental health problems are invasive, even irreversible, and psychiatric medication has the potential to cause very serious adverse effects. The Alliance believes that safeguards are needed to ensure that patients receive effective treatments whose benefits to them outweigh their harm. These safeguards are in addition to making impaired decision-making by reason of mental disorder the threshold for the use of compulsory powers.
The Alliance proposes that mental health legislation should:
- Set out essential elements of a care plan and the principles of treatment. Principles of treatment should include evidence-based reasons for prescribing a treatment; an assessment of the balance of benefit and harm, and continuing review of this;
- Stipulate that advance directives may not be overridden without extra safeguards being applied, and that advance statements requesting particular treatments be given due weight;
- Promote a multidisciplinary approach to treatment, so that a wide range of treatment options is considered;
- Provide specific safeguards against prescribing outside the standard dose range of drugs;
- Ensure that ECT is not given to 16 or 17 year olds without the authority of the Tribunal.
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