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:
“A major misunderstanding of child rearing has been the idea that meeting a child’s needs is an end in itself, for the purpose of the child’s mental health. Mothers have not understood that this is but one step in social development, the goal of which is to help a child begin to consider others. As a result, they often have not considered their children but have instead allowed their children’s reality to take precedence, out of a fear of damaging them emotionally.”
—Elaine Heffner (20th century)
“She, her head back, waited
Barbarous the stalking tide;
Her, nor balked nor sated
But plunged into the wide
Area of mental ire,
Lay at her wandering side.”
—Allen Tate (1899–1979)
“In health of mind and body, men should see with their own eyes, hear and speak without trumpets, walk on their feet, not on wheels, and work and war with their arms, not with engine-beams, nor rifles warranted to kill twenty men at a shot before you can see them.”
—John Ruskin (1819–1900)
“I have witnessed, and greatly enjoyed, the first act of everything which Wagner created, but the effect on me has always been so powerful that one act was quite sufficient; whenever I have witnessed two acts I have gone away physically exhausted; and whenever I have ventured an entire opera the result has been the next thing to suicide.”
—Mark Twain [Samuel Langhorne Clemens] (1835–1910)