Charter Rights

The Charter of Rights and Freedoms Act of Canada ensures that citizens who are detained or arrested have the Right to contact a lawyer to have the validity of their detention checked, to see if their detention is lawful, and if it is not lawful, then to be released from custody!

B.C. Lawyer Gerrit Clements wrote; "However, the question arises regarding the patient who is capable, but who refuses to consent.  The form does not provide for this situation, but in all likelihood the patient's refusal would be taken to indicate an incapability of "appreciating the nature of treatment and [the] need for it".  The director would then go ahead and provide consent.  It should be remembered that the consent at issue here is to authorize psychiatric treatment as opposed to other medical treatment."  

Taken from the book,

A Legal Handbook for the Helping Professional

Second Edition

Edited by Max R. Uhlemann & David Turner

The Law Founation of British Columbia

The Sedgewick Society for Consumer and Public Education

Pages 222-223 Consent To Treatment Chapter 9 MENTAL HEALTH: DISORDER AND INCAPABILITY

We at PSWA Canada oppose the term "patient",  we prefer proposed patient, refering to indivduals who have not yet been diagnosed with mental illness an comitted.______________________________________________________________

Canadian Mental Health Association

Informed Consent to Treatment

Principals

(Note:  PSWA Canada has taken a few of those (important to us) beliefs and posted them below.)

"Based on these beliefs, the National Board of Directors of the Canadian Mental Health Association endorses the following principals:

• The individual's voluntary informed consent must be a prerequuisite to any treatment. Exceptions should be rare and only applied in cases of emergency or mental incompetency.
• At all times, the individual must be treated with respect, dignity and as having the capacity to make informed decisions regarding consent to treatment and/or treatment options or refusal of treatment.
• The risk of treatment versus no treatment should be examined.
• The mesure of competancy should be whether the individual to receive care understands and appreciates the implications of the issues above, Criteria for measuring competancy should be explained to the individual.  refusal to consent should not be deemed evidence of an inability to understand or a part of symptomatology.   Rather it may be an act of self determination and freedom, particularly in the context of a potentially coercive institutional environment.
• Steps should be taken to determine whether a type of advance health care directive exists, and, if so, every effort made to honour it.  The opportunity to develope an advance health care directive should be made available to all people across Canada.
• All individuals should have the right to appoint a person who should make fully informed decisions on their behalf in case of the individual's incompetency.  In the instance of incometency the decision-maker appointed by the individual should be the first person approached for a fully informed consent.  If such a person has not been appointed, legal processes shall be used to obtain consent.
• All individuals should have access to timely and affordable legal councel or access to individuals or agencies that can act on their behalf.
• The medical file should be considered the property of the individual client, subject to the right of the caregiver or institution to house the file."

December 1996_______________________________________________________