Mental Capacity: A Policy Brief

In this post I report on a recently launched brief, prepared by Sophie Stammers for policy makers and mental health and social care professionals, entitled "Mitigating the risk of assumptions and biases in assessments of mental capacity". The work on the brief was funded by the University of Birmingham and the actual brief was launched with a Webinar hosted by the Mental Elf on 26th March 2020.

Mark Brown introduced the presentations and moderated the discussion. I summarised the main findings of project PERFECT relevant to the brief, and Sophie explained our recommendations, based on her research but also on extensive consultations conducted in January to March 2020.

Sophie Stammers

The conversation continued on Twitter where people made comments and asked questions using the #MentalCapacity2020 hashtag. Alex Ruck Keene wrote a post on the brief which appeared on the Mental Elf blog. Alex is a barrister specialising in mental capacity and mental health law. He is also a Wellcome Research Fellow at King’s College London, and created a website on mental health capacity law and policy.

Alex Ruck Green

What was the rationale for consulting mental health providers, service users, organisations, and policy makers on mental capacity? Mental health and social care professionals routinely assess the capacity of people to make decisions about their lives, in accordance with the Mental Capacity Act 2005 (MCA).

The briefing note outlines how the functional approach to testing capacity in the MCA underdetermines decisions, describing the risks for stereotypes and assumptions to affect outcomes. It advocates for the need for specific training for professionals using the MCA to enable them to recognise the role of value judgements in capacity decisions, to mitigate the effects of stereotyping and assumptions, and to improve decision making.

If you want to know more, you can watch the Webinar on YouTube, or read the full brief on the Project PERFECT website, easy to download in an accessible PDF. On the website, you also find some quotes with stakeholders' reactions to our recommendations.

For instance, Anneliese Dodds, Labour (Co-op) MP for Oxford East said:

"There is now quite widespread recognition of the biases which affect decision-making, such as negativity bias in our retention of information from the media. Yet our awareness of these biases does not seem to feed in to our understanding of mental health, which often categorises people as ‘irrational’ in an unspecified way. This can be a political issue; I’ve been urged previously not to engage with people with mental ill-health on the grounds that they ‘would not be interested’, yet people suffering from mental ill-health are often not only interested in politics but have a great deal of importance to say and are not less ‘rational’, depending on the type of illness they are suffering from. These issues surely need more consideration, which is why I was pleased to see the progress of the PERFECT research project."

Delusions in the DSM 5

This post is by Lisa Bortolotti. How has the definition of delusions changed in the DSM 5? Here are some first impressions. In the DSM-IV (Glossary) delusions were defined as follows: Delusion. A false belief based on incorrect inference about external reality that is firmly sustained despite what almost everyone else believes and despite what constitutes incontrovertible and obvious proof or evidence to the contrary. The belief is not one ordinarily accepted by other members of the person's culture or subculture (e.g., it is not an article of religious faith). When a false belief involves a value judgment, it is regarded as a delusion only when the judgment is so extreme as to defy credibility.

Rationalization: Why your intelligence, vigilance and expertise probably don't protect you

Today's post is by Jonathan Ellis , Associate Professor of Philosophy and Director of the Center for Public Philosophy at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and Eric Schwitzgebel , Professor of Philosophy at the University of California, Riverside. This is the first in a two-part contribution on their paper "Rationalization in Moral and Philosophical thought" in Moral Inferences , eds. J. F. Bonnefon and B. Trémolière (Psychology Press, 2017). We’ve all been there. You’re arguing with someone – about politics, or a policy at work, or about whose turn it is to do the dishes – and they keep finding all kinds of self-serving justifications for their view. When one of their arguments is defeated, rather than rethinking their position they just leap to another argument, then maybe another. They’re rationalizing –coming up with convenient defenses for what they want to believe, rather than responding even-handedly to the points you're making. Yo

A co-citation analysis of cross-disciplinarity in the empirically-informed philosophy of mind

Today's post is by Karen Yan (National Yang Ming Chiao Tung University) on her recent paper (co-authored with Chuan-Ya Liao), " A co-citation analysis of cross-disciplinarity in the empirically-informed philosophy of mind " ( Synthese 2023). Karen Yan What drives us to write this paper is our curiosity about what it means when philosophers of mind claim their works are informed by empirical evidence and how to assess this quality of empirically-informedness. Building on Knobe’s (2015) quantitative metaphilosophical analyses of empirically-informed philosophy of mind (EIPM), we investigated further how empirically-informed philosophers rely on empirical research and what metaphilosophical lessons to draw from our empirical results. We utilize scientometric tools and categorization analysis to provide an empirically reliable description of EIPM. Our methodological novelty lies in integrating the co-citation analysis tool with the conceptual resources from the philosoph

Imperfect Cognitions

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