Shared decision making in mental health: special issue of the Mental Health Review Journal
| Pages | 149-151 |
| Date | 11 September 2017 |
| Published date | 11 September 2017 |
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.1108/MHRJ-01-2017-0008 |
| Author | Shulamit Ramon,Yaara Zisman-Ilani,Emma Kaminskiy |
| Subject Matter | Health & social care,Mental health |
Shulamit Ramon, Yaara Zisman-Ilani and Emma Kaminskiy
Shared decision making in mental health: special issue of the Mental Health
Review Journal
This special issue reflects our wish to take into account the recent developments in the research
and practice of shared decision making (SDM) in the field of mental health, and share this
knowledge with service users, practitioners, researchers, and policymakers interested in SDM
in this issue. We view SDM as the process in which decisions related to mental health treatment
and interventions are reached as a co-production through sharing different types of knowledge:
professional or evidence based vs more experiential knowledge of people with the lived
experience of mental ill health (Deegan, 2010; Morant et al., 2016).
SDM occupies the middle position of the range, which begins with decisions made only by the
clinicians on behalf of people, and ends with decisions made only by the people who use mental
health services (Charles et al., 1997, 1999). It has the potential to foster good collaboration
between service users and providers based on trust, mutual respect, and readiness to share
concerns, hope, and knowledge. For some, the desired outcomes would be the greater honesty
in the relationships, increased motivation for change, and empowerment. For others, the focus
would be on agreeing to follow a specific treatment regime, or a joint decision to try out a new
intervention ( James and Quirk, 2017).
For many years, the research and practice of SDM in mental health has lagged behind
general medicine. Explanation for that might be related to the primary care origins of the SDM
model (Charles et al., 1997, 1999; Elwyn et al., 1999; O’Connor et al., 2006) and to
prevalent assumptions related to the lack of decision capacity among people experiencing
mental ill health (Lincoln et al., 2007). Hamann et al.’s (2003) review of SDM in mental health
represents one of the first attempts to focus attention emphasise the need and potential for
SDM in mental health. However, their focus was on medications decision making.
With the introduction of the new meaning of personal recovery to mental health
(Anthony, 1993; Davidson, 2003; Slade, 2009), and the acknowledgement that people with
the lived experience of mental ill health have strengths and not only deficits (Rapp, 2006), an
increased interest emerged into the potential role and promise of SDM for personal recovery in
mental health (Dra ke et al., 2010). Now, seven years after the important special issue on the
promise of SDM to me ntal health (Drake et al., 2010); in this special issue, we would like to
describe the effo rts that have been done regarding SDM i n mental health and the future steps
that are still needed.
Methodologically, most articles in the special issue include an updated systematic literature
search in the English language, albeit in a variety of forms, for the last decade or more, followed
by a thematic analysis or a narrative synthesis. The authors of the commissioned review articles
come from Germany, Spain, UK and the USA, and include researchers, service users, and
providers, from the disciplines of counselling, nursing, psychiatry, psychology, sociology, and
social work.
The articles in this special issue cover different topics: the rationale of SDM ( James and Quirk,
2017), the perspectives on mental health SDM by service users, family members, and service
providers (Kaminskiy et al., 2017), the range of SDM interventions and their underlying
components (Zisman-Ilani et al., 2017), SDM from the perspective of recovery-oriented person
centred care (Davidson et al., 2017), SDM measures and outcomes (Perestelo-Perez et al.,
2017), and the implementation of SDM in everyday practice (Ramon et al., 2017), of which
relatively little has been published up to now.
Shulamit Ramon is a Professor
at the School of Health and
Social Work, University of
Hertfordshire, Hatfield, UK.
Yaara Zisman-Ilani is an
Assistant Professor at the
Department of Rehabilitation
Sciences, College of Public
Health, Temple University,
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA.
Emma Kaminskiy is a Senior
Lecturer at the Department of
Psychology, Anglia Ruskin
University, Cambridge, UK.
DOI 10.1108/MHRJ-01-2017-0008 VOL. 22 NO. 3 2017, pp. 149-151, © Emerald Publishing Limited, ISSN 1361-9322
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