Completed Mental Health Psychology & Behaviour

Mental Health and Justice

Funder Wellcome Charity-funded
Recipient organisation King's College London
Funding £2.6M
Period Jan 2017 — Jan 2022

In plain English

AI plain-English summary

When someone with a mental health condition makes a decision that others consider unwise, the law faces a stark choice: step in to protect them, or respect their choice as their own. This research network—bringing together lawyers, psychiatrists, philosophers, and neuroscientists—tackles that dilemma head-on. The problem is urgent. International human rights law increasingly demands that people with mental disabilities be supported in making their own decisions, not overridden. Yet clinicians and courts still rely on blunt assessments of "decision-making capacity" that can strip a person of all legal agency. The gap is between what human rights treaties promise and what everyday practice delivers. If this succeeds, the team will produce practical guidelines for how to assess decision-making ability without trampling on autonomy, and how to provide genuine support rather than substitute judgment. That could reshape how mental health tribunals, care homes, and hospital wards operate—not just in the UK but internationally, as countries implement the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities. The work is applied by design: it aims to change law, policy, and clinical practice directly, not just to understand the problem better.

View original technical description
Mental Health and Justice brings together a unique collaboration addressing the central dilemma in mental health, ethics and law: the tension between protecting and respecting a person’s decision-making. As law in this area commits to human rights and as the international dimension presses, sharp new challenges are arising and now is the time to take up the interdisciplinary challenge. We focus on two fundamental concepts - support in decision-making and decision-making ability – and investigate with six interlinking work-streams addressing key issues. The collaboration involves leading clinical experts, lawyers, philosophers , neuroscientists and social scientists engaging in a research network with a carefully crafted team composition and management. Highly integrated into the proposal are policy, service user-research and public engagement expertise. We will deliver practical guidelines, policy engagement, advancement of interdisciplinary working and innovation in service-user involvement in research and public engagement. Mental Health and Justice will build an outstanding research network in the field of mental health, ethics and law for the next decade and will provide new solutions to a vexed dilemma facing society, healthcare and law. Keywords: mental health, supported decision-making, decision-making ability, Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, decision-making capacity, metacognition, insight.

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Researchers

Gareth Owen (EPMC Awardee)

Related Research

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Original classification

Collaborative Award in H&SS

Plain English summaries and category classifications on this site are generated by AI and may not perfectly reflect the original research.