Ms Ber Grogan:

I have had a quick look at my notes on the Mental Health Commission and that issue. Articles 12 and 14 of the CRPD require that mental health laws are replaced by consensual practices and services based on a social and human rights model rather than a medical model. This comes back to the person-centred approach, working with the person on his or her care plan. A welcome addition to the heads of the Bill relating to mental health is the review board.

There will be a psychosocial assessment, because, again, it is about looking at the person as a whole, including their housing situation, their financial situation, their supports and at all of those kinds of aspects. The Assisted Decision-Making (Capacity) Act 2015 was passed in 2015 and there has been a huge amount of work done to get us to this point where it will hopefully all be amended and commenced by June 2022. The decision support service has been doing great work on having open consultations on its codes of practice and guidelines. There are, therefore, many opportunities for people with lived experience and family members, supporters and carers to feed in to the process. Members probably saw the "RTÉ Investigates" piece a couple of weeks ago on wardship and on how it will be replaced but it will take up to three years for people who are already in the wardship system to be processed and to be given new decision making supports, depending on the level of need for them.

One of the things around the capacity assessments and the Assisted Decision-Making (Capacity) Act 2015 is that the heads call for two professionals to undertake the capacity assessments, whereas in Mental Health Reform's submission we called for three professionals so that there is a broader view from mental health professionals and not necessarily from the same cohort. On that as well, our My Voice Matters research piece, which was done in 2019, is the largest piece of research of people who access mental health services, and there was another one done on the family supporters and carers. A huge number of people want to be more involved in the care plans and maybe there is an over-reliance on the medical model rather than treatment as a whole, which includes talk therapies and all of that kind of stuff. It is really about what is right for the person. As Ms Coyle said, it is not a tick box exercise; people are not going to fit neatly into standardised care plans, therefore we have to meet them where they are at.