Mental Health Act Assessments
AMHPs are responsible for organising, co-ordinating and contributing to Mental Health Act assessments. It is the AMHP's duty, when two medical recommendations have been made, to decide whether or not to make an application to a named hospital for the detention of the person who has been assessed. To be detained under the Mental Health Act individuals need to be suffering from a mental disorder, the nature or degree of which warrants detention in hospital on the grounds of their health and/or the risk they present to themselves and/or the risk they present to others. The AMHP's role includes arranging for the assessment of the person concerned by two medical practitioners who must be independent of each other and at least one of whom should be a specialist in mental health. Preferably one of the medical assessors should have previous acquaintance with the person being assessed. Efforts should be made to seek less restrictive alternatives to detention if it is safe and appropriate to do so, such as using an individuals's own support networks, in line with the principle of care in the least restrictive environment. AMHP's are expected to take account of factors such as gender, culture, ethnicity, age, sexuality and disability in their assessments. Efforts should be also made to overcome any communication barriers, such as deafness or the assessors and the assessed not sharing a language, and an interpreter may be required. It is not good practice for one of the assessors to act as interpreter.
Read more about this topic: Approved Mental Health Professional
Famous quotes containing the words mental health, mental, health and/or act:
“All that remains to the mother in modern consumer society is the role of scapegoat; psychoanalysis uses huge amounts of money and time to persuade analysands to foist their problems on to the absent mother, who has no opportunity to utter a word in her own defence. Hostility to the mother in our societies is an index of mental health.”
—Germaine Greer (b. 1939)
“Health is a state of complete physical, mental and social well-being, and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity.”
—Constitution of the World Health Organization.
“A woman’s health is her capital.”
—Harriet Beecher Stowe (1811–1896)
“For I choose that my remembrances of him should be pleasing, affecting, religious. I will love him as a glorified friend, after the free way of friendship, and not pay him a stiff sign of respect, as men do to those whom they fear. A passage read from his discourses, a moving provocation to works like his, any act or meeting which tends to awaken a pure thought, a flow of love, an original design of virtue, I call a worthy, a true commemoration.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)