Dr Gareth Owen: A phenomenological study of decision-making capacity in psychiatric disorders
Funded by a Clinical Research Fellowship in Biomedical Ethics
The law places increasing emphasis on the concept of mental capacity as a means to protect patient autonomy. This is putting new demands upon clinicians and courts to give grounds on which psychiatric disorders can challenge the legal presumption of capacity and justify surrogate decision making.
The law specifies three main reasons: inability to understand information relevant to a decision, inability to retain information and inability to use or weigh information in the process of making a decision. The 'use and weigh' ability is most relevant in psychiatric disorders, yet it causes the greatest challenges of interpretation.
Dr Owen's research project seeks to investigate how three psychiatric disorders may threaten the 'use and weigh' ability by probing the decision-making task as the patient encounters it.
Because decision-making capacity crosses three areas - psychiatry, law and philosophy - the research is interdisciplinary and involves Dr Owen working in close collaboration with a philosopher and an experienced mental health lawyer on the analysis of his empirical data.
The goal of the research is both practical (to assist better practical assessments of capacity) and theoretical (to inform and enrich philosophical discussions about freedom and autonomy using cases of decision-making incapacity).
