Now Mental Health Patients Can Specify Their Care Before Hallucinations and Voices Overwhelm Them

#1

Increasingly, patients, advocates and doctors believe such directives (called PADs) could help transform the mental health system by allowing patients to shape their care even when they lose touch with reality. Hospitals must put them in patients’ medical records and doctors are expected to follow them unless they document that specific preferences aren’t in the patients’ best medical interest.

As the pendulum has swung from institutionalization to outpatient care, psychiatric directives also offer a middle path by allowing patients to designate family members to speak for them when they’re too sick to do so themselves.

But some doctors and hospitals are wary that the documents could tie their hands and discourage treatment they consider warranted. Some worry the directives won’t be updated to reflect medical advances. Others question whether people with serious psychiatric conditions are ever capable of lucidly completing such directives.

Still, early research and experience suggest that PADs, authorized by law in 27 states and possible in others as part of conventional medical advance directives, could help some of the millions of people with serious mental illness cope better and guide doctors treating them.

Full Story:

Details on these, and sample Advance Directives available at the following links:

http://www.bazelon.org/our-work/mental-health-systems/advance-directives/

and

http://www.bazelon.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/PAD-Template.pdf

#2

"Psychiatric advance directives allow patients with serious mental illness to specify the treatment they want if they become too sick to say"

Soooo…I can ask for 5 strippers and a keg of beer if i lose my mind? :wink:

#3

The article never mentioned the cost to create this for a mental patient. I wonder if anyone would respect my wishes. I have seen firsthand disregard of medical directives.

#4

The mental health system is broken. It is made by idiots who don’t understand people with mental illness.

It’s a broken mental health system within a broken society.

You can’t fix one without fixing the other.

But if it makes you sleep easier at night, believe what you like Szadmin :slight_smile:

#5

Why do many of us want to kill ourselves?

Why are we treated like hannibal lectors, or psychopaths, when most of us are harmless?

We are psychotic not psychopathic.

Why do most of us say stigma is the worst part of the illness, even though all of the symptoms are terrible?

Why is that Szadmin?

#6

You want to think the system is great, and we are all doing great…

Wow…

That is a bigger delusion than I’ve ever had.

#7

I’m building a list of evils of our society, please feel free to add your own

  1. the evil done by society to people with mental illness

  2. the factory farming of animals

  3. inequality to members of the female gender

  4. oh that will do for now…

  5. the me me me of each individual, not caring about others

#8

now that was funny…!! good one @PatrickT

#9
  1. the police suck too
#10

The charity organization I belong to encouraged me to complete a PAD but they stopped helping me complete it.

#11

The advance directive will empower me. If I had an advance directive my fear of hospitalization would decrease as I’d have more control over what can and cannot be done to me. Also, I’d be more likely to seek hospitalization if the need arises.

The advance directive will protect me from unnecessary and harmful medical treatment. It will also protect me by increasing transparency and accountability.

#12

So… I’m trusted to drive a school bus full of other people’s kids, a fuel truck with 17,000L of petrol, to coach youth archery, to council people on insurance solutions to avoid irreparable financial harm … but not decide my own health directives?

BIGOTS.

:rage:

#13

yeah, i’ve been meaning to contact a guy for a couple of weeks now to do one, we’ve been doing them for years, i was supposed to do it a while ago but it didnt work out bc i didnt have my car at the time, i’m use to calling them personal advanced statements but the word directives has been getting used more lately :slight_smile:

#15

I looked at a pre-filled one of these where I was given a set of boxes to check, then sign in the presence of a notary, and that was that. Problem was that I didn’t like any of the options I was presented with to check. I didn’t want to check any of the boxes. So, I didn’t bother with it after that. They want to make it sound like they are giving us control over our mental health treatment choices, but they’re not really doing that. What the one I saw boiled down to was simply a way to get me committed and drugged very easily and quickly, bypassing the normal route involving mental health court (which is a joke in itself, but still a little bit more difficult than this). And giving a parent or some other relative complete control over me even though I am an adult.

#17

So these people ignorantly,due to lack of intelligence perhaps?, think that people with serious psychiatric conditions are permanently in a non lucid state?

What a crock of ■■■■! People with SMI can be lucid enough if stabilised on medication. If not why are many of these people pushing this line of thought also very keen to have people with SMI on medication?

If a person is stabilised on medication and functioning reasonably well there is no reason why they can’t set up an advance directive in case the wheels ever fall off the wagon again.