Assessing a patient’s capacity to consent is a core responsibility in psychiatric practice. Recent understanding shows that evaluating capacity requires more than checking cognitive skills. Clinicians now recognize the importance of context, insight, emotional state, and personal values in addition to reasoning and understanding. Understanding Decision-Making Capacity Traditionally, capacity assessment focused on cognition, including comprehension, reasoning, memory, and the ability to communicate a decision.
While these remain important, capacity is now understood as dynamic and decision-specific. A patient may have the ability to consent to one treatment but not another, and capacity can change over time. A Broader Approach to Assessment A modern approach to capacity includes: Evaluating cognitive understanding and reasoning along with insight into illness, emotional state, and…
