Encouraging Supported Decision Making: Mental Health Nurses' Role

This essay provides an overview of supported decision-making (SDM) within the context of mental health, highlighting its significance as an alternative to guardianship and its role in promoting patient autonomy. It references the Mental Health Act 2014 and emphasizes the crucial role of mental health nurses in facilitating SDM by building trust, providing support, and respecting patient preferences. The paper argues that SDM enhances the quality of life for individuals with mental illness and encourages further research to address concerns regarding its adoption and to compare its outcomes with traditional decision-making approaches.

Running head: SUPPORTED DECISION MAKING 1
Supported Decision Making
Name
Institutional Affiliation

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SUPPORTED DECISION MAKING
Introduction
The Mental Health Act 2014 became effective on 2014-07-01. It has delivered
key reforms to the mental health system in Victoria by putting people with mental
disorders at the center of treatment, care as well as recoveries. This Act plays a key
role in the provision of legislative framework for mental health in a number of ways. It
promotes supported decision-making while encouraging firm communication between
consumers, health providers, patient families alongside carers. The Act further supports
individuals with mental disorders to make as well as partake in decisions about their
treatment and to have their preferences and perspectives respected and considered.
The Act encourages psychiatrists alongside other mental health providers to
develop firm relationships with individuals utilizing mental health services, and to give
them useful information and support for making informed choices regarding care. It
further promotes voluntary treatment in preferences to forced treatment and creates
vigorous oversights and safeguard mechanisms for protecting rights, autonomy and
dignity of individuals living with mental disease. SDM is defined as a sequence of
relationships, practices, agreements and arrangements tailored to help an individual
with disability arrive at decisions and converse decisions to other people regarding their
life. This paper uses the Act to demonstrate discuss supported decision-making, it
useful in mental health context and the means by which mental health nurse
encourages SDM.
Discussion
Supported Decision Making
SDM permits mentally ill persons to make informed selections regarding their
individual lives with support from a team of persons (Blanck & Martinis, 2015). People
with mental illness select individuals they know as well as trust to become part of a
specific support network to assist in making informed decisions. SDM remains an
alternative to guardianship whereby guardians make informed decisions for the person
with mental illness. Nonetheless, SDM permits an individual with mental illness to make
her or his own decision rather than have someone else make such decisions on the
behalf (Slade, 2017). SDM promotes control, autonomy and self-determination thus

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fostering reliance. Everyone engages in SDM as they consult with friends and family,
classmates, or colleagues, mentors or mechanism prior to reaching a decision.
People living with mental illness might need help in making decisions regarding
their healthcare, living arrangements, financial matters and relationships. However, they
do not essentially required a guardian to make such decision on their behalf. A trusted
network of supporters are able to field questions alongside review alternatives to assist
an individual with mental illness make his own decision. Supporters get chosen by the
person with mental illness. Such supporters might be co-workers, members of a family,
friends, and relatives, present or past providers. The person need to choose supporters
who respect and know her or his preferences and will, and who shall honor the
selections and decisions the person makes.
Importance of SDM in Mental Health Setting
Individuals under the guardianship witness a type of “civil death” since they
always lose their rights to make their own desired decisions regarding their treatment,
care and recovery. This is because their guardian will make care on their behalf
regarding key issues in their lives including personal health care, finances, marriage
and raising families, people to associate with and other significant daily decisions
(Shogren & Wehmeyer, 2015). Many persons with mental illness in Australia are under
the guardianship, however, the number might sore, provided the remarkable data
dearth. The number of persons with intellectual or developmental disabilities (I/DD)
under this program is anticipated to surge over the coming few decades. Because of
improved medical care, various individuals from this group shall outlive their family and
parent caregivers. The data demonstrates that by 2030, there shall be many million
persons above sixty-years-old with intellectual disabilities in Australia who shall be
susceptible to guardianship (Das et al., 2019).
Simultaneously, the numbers of guardianship are rising alongside a paradigm
shift away from the excessively protective guardianship construct towards the more
right-centric SDM construct. Even though the SDM is merely gaining a foothold in
Australia, this idea has been evolving in other nations for over a decade ( Shogren &
Wehmeyer, 2015). Various nations have long discovered that every individual-including
mentally ill-has legal capacity to make informed decisions. Such a concept has been

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advanced when the UNC on Rights of People with Disabilities voted in the year 2006
thereby adopting Article 12. SDM is, therefore, important in boosting a mentally ill
individual’s capacity in the process of decision-making, allowing him to preserve his
independence in life decisions. This implies that SDM has the prospective to
meaningfully enhance QoL and well-being of people with severe mental disorder.
Encouraging SDM in Mental Health by Nurses
Nurses have been viewed as key enablers for SDM. Individuals who experience
serious mental health challenges have explained the significant role played by
supportive mental health providers in facilitating their engagement in process of making
decision about their treatment, care and recovery (Davidson et al., 2015). Nurses have
desired communication skills which makes them attentive to these patients’ needs and
tailor interventions to their patients instead of delivering ‘standard advice. This is a clear
evidence that nurse involve patients in SDM by being engaged and trustworthy. Nurses
also encourage SDM because they are interested in and specialized in and have
personal experiences of relatives with lived experience of mental illness. Such
experiences have empowered mental ill patients with nurses who create therapeutic
and good relationships with their patients. This is because these nurse have desired
qualities like honesty, empathy, flexibility, advocacy skills, friendliness and
communication skills that allow mentally ill patients to effectively relate with them in
SDM.
Conclusion
This paper has described the SDM and its importance in mental health setting as
well as demonstrated how nurse promote SDM. It has shown that SDM is more effective
than guardianship which limits the autonomy of mentally ill patients in making their
individual decisions in treatment, care alongside recovery. Despite SDM’s potential
promise, research is need to tackle the concerns regarding SDM’s adoption. A study is
needed that systematically compares SDM outcomes to substitute decision making.
Studies should also focus on empirically proving whether and the extent, SDM might be
linked to better decisions considering difficulties in classifying which decisions stay
“worse or better,” greater decision making-process satisfaction and a surged
empowerment sense among people with mental illness.

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