Working with Dignity and Respect: Improving Mental Health Services with Digital Stories (original) (raw)
Related papers
The Right to Mental Health in the Digital Era
People with mental illness usually experience higher rates of disability and mortality. Often, health care systems do not adequately respond to the burden of mental disorders worldwide. The number of health care providers dealing with mental health care is insufficient in many countries. Equal access to necessary health services should be granted to mentally ill people without any discrimination. E-mental health is expected to enhance the quality of care as well as accessibility, availability and affordability of services. This paper examines under what conditions e-mental health can contribute to realising the right to health by using the availability, accessibility, acceptability and quality (AAAQ) framework that is developed by the Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights. Research shows e-mental health facilitates dissemination of information, remote consultation and patient monitoring and might increase access to mental health care. Furthermore, patient participation might increase, and stigma and discrimination might be reduced by the use of e-mental health. However, e-mental health might not increase the access to health care for everyone, such as the digitally illiterate or those who do not have access to the Internet. The affordability of this service, when it is not covered by insurance, can be a barrier to access to this service. In addition, not all e-mental health services are acceptable and of good quality. Policy makers should adopt new legal policies to respond to the present and future developments of modern technologies in health, as well as e-Mental health. To analyse the impact of e-mental health on the right to health, additional research is necessary.
Towards the Design of Ethical Standards Related to Digital Mental Health and all Its Applications
Current Treatment Options in Psychiatry, 2019
Purpose of the review Digital health technologies offer tremendous potential in increasing access to services and augmenting existing services. Utilizing these technologies, however, poses new ethical considerations for clinicians, researchers, and healthcare organizations. These issues have been particularly apparent recently with several public instances of misuse of digitally available personal data. Responsibility for ethics is distributed among creators, end users, and purveyors which has meant that this aspect of digital technology production and use tends to be thought of as someone else's problem. Recent findings In this overview, we discuss key ethical issues and dilemmas in order to drive ethical implementation, future technology development, and potential formal and informal regulation. Key considerations discussed include risk-benefit ratios, privacy and data security, ethical development of digital mental health tools, ethical research processes, and informed consent. Concrete recommendations are made for different stakeholders in digital mental health. Summary Digital mental health tools come with ethical considerations for the public, patients, clinicians, and health services to feel confident in their use. It will be essential for all groups to recognize their responsibilities and begin to shape frameworks for ethical development and implementation.
The Human Rights Based Approach to mental health service user involvement uses the human rights frameworks to exercise the right to health: set out in Article 12 of the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ICESR). This right to health contains the freedom to make decisions about one’s own health; the entitlement to a system of health protection; available, accessible, acceptable health facilities, goods and services that are appropriate and of good quality; non-discrimination; government obligations to respect, protect and fulfil the right to health; monitoring; accountability mechanisms and remedies; and finally, participation. The Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD) reinforces the principle of participation and the importance of service user/rights holder involvement more generally. So, for example, Article 4(3) states: "In the development and implementation of legislation and policies to implement the present Convention, and in other decision-making processes concerning issues relating to persons with disabilities, States Parties shall closely consult with and actively involve persons with disabilities, including children with disabilities, through their representative organizations." The principle of participation is therefore a key component of the Human Rights Based Approach to health, including Mental Health, and permeates all of the above aspects of enjoyment of the right to the highest attainable standard of health. The principle of participation is the focus of this paper. There are two elements to this principle: 1. participation in individual care and treatment planning; and 2. participation in developing, implementing and monitoring law, policy, programmes and services. As the Irish State is the principle duty bearer of this right to health and the primary provider of mental health services in Ireland, there is a particular responsibility on the State to develop mechanisms to facilitate participation. Previous empirical research by this scholar indicated a major deficit in terms of partnership working in mental health services in the west of Ireland, with wide-spread failures to communicate clearly with service users or to consult with people about their care and treatment. Partnership was conceptualised under two categories: Therapeutic partnerships, which are closely aligned to the first type of participation, at the individual level of care and treatment: secondly, Strategic partnerships which can be aligned to the second form of participation outlined above; that of the involvement of service users in planning, delivering and monitoring policy and services. Failures of partnerships with service users at both levels suggest that much work is required to understand and realise the principles of participation, and of human rights frameworks. A Human Rights Based Approach can become a powerful mechanism to leverage movement on the right to participation at all levels on decisions affecting care and treatment, but also at strategic levels of service development, monitoring, evaluation as well as policy development. How a Human Rights Based Approach to user involvement might be understood and utilised by mental health service users as rights holders will be explored in some detail in this paper.
2020
Background: The legal framework for governing involuntary treatment in England and Wales is set out in the Mental Health Act (1983) which gives health professionals power, in certain circumstances, to detain, assess and treat people considered to have a ‘mental disorder’, in the interest of their own health and safety or for public safety. It is accompanied by a Code of Practice and other statutory safeguards that aim to preserve service users’ human rights. While some people find psychiatric inpatient treatment helpful and necessary, there are growing concerns that services are failing to protect service users’ human rights. Aims: To deepen an understanding of how service users’ human rights are respected on psychiatric inpatient wards. Key research questions were: what are voluntary and involuntary inpatient service users’ experiences of staff respecting their human rights; what are voluntary and involuntary inpatient service users’ experiences of being informed about their rights...
Ethics of Digital Mental Health During COVID-19: Crisis and Opportunities (Preprint)
2020
UNSTRUCTURED Viewpoint Article : ocial distancing measures due to the Covid-19 pandemic have accelerated the adoption and implementation of digital mental health tools. Psychiatry and therapy sessions are being conducted via video-conferencing platforms and digital mental health tools for monitoring and treatment are exploding in use. This rapid shift to telehealth during the pandemic has given additional urgency to the ethical challenges presented by digital mental health tools. Regulatory standards have been relaxed to allow this shift to socially-distanced mental health care. It is imperative to ensure that implementation of digital mental health tools, especially in this context of crisis, is guided by ethical principles and abides by professional codes of conduct. This article examines key areas for an ethical path forward in this digital mental health revolution: 1) privacy and data protection; 2) safety and accountability; and 3) access and fairness.
Internet access as a right for realizing the human right to adequate mental (and other) health care
International Journal of Mental Health, 2020
Where a licence is displayed above, please note the terms and conditions of the licence govern your use of this document. When citing, please reference the published version. Take down policy While the University of Birmingham exercises care and attention in making items available there are rare occasions when an item has been uploaded in error or has been deemed to be commercially or otherwise sensitive.
Human Rights as a Pathway in Mental Health Settings
Mental health is an issue which touches the lives of many people worldwide. This often affects not only the person themselves but also their family and friends. The way in which society deals with mental health issues raises many human rights points for example in relation to service provision, treatment, assessment and civil detention, protection and empowerment. The simplest way of defining human rights is that they are about balancing the inalienable rights of all of us as human beings within the community regardless of differences in birth, social origin, gender, physical differences, faith and belief, ideology, nationality and so on. There can be no disagreement with the universally acclaimed truth that human dignity is the quintessence of human rights. This article shows lights on concept of human rights and to know how it is a pathway in mental health settings.