Patient was under s2 for 28 days for assessment. S2 rescinded on day 28 as no evidence of mental disorder. Patient lacks capacity to make decisions regarding being accommodated in the psychiatric hospital whilst the LA make her home fit for purpose (separate court proceedings were ongoing before the s2 to evict her from her current home and move her elsewhere). On-going issues regarding her presentation/severe self neglect.
The issue is the psychiatrist applied for a DoL but in the urgent application stated the person is not suffering from a mental disorder. The supervisory body extended the 7 day urgent authorisation which is due to expire on the 4th August. We think the MH/BIA has undertaken the assessments but awaiting outcome for the standard.
My question is - was the urgent authorisation even valid to begin with (due to no mental disorder) or are we ok to wait for the outcome of the MH/BIA assessments/standard authorisation request before deciding whether her on-going deprivation needs to be considered by the Court of Protection?
While I donāt believe this question has been addressed in any judgement, it seems to me, as a BIA, that failure to complete the āmental disorderā check box (and in addition it not being an error, but a clear decision by the referrer) renders the urgent authorisation fundamentally flawed.
The only way a person can be deprived of their liberty during the course of an urgent authorisation, before a full DoLS assessment, is the initial statement from the referrer that it appears that all the qualifying conditions are met.
You are saying that the referrer felt that one of those conditions was not met.
As a side issue, I would be interested to know how the person is assessed as lacking capacity to make decisions regarding their hospitalisation, without having some condition which falls within the very broad MHA definition of mental disorder, even if they are not considered āsectionableā.
I agree with Steve, I think the psychiatrist needs to be clear a) what was the āimpairment or disturbance in the functioning of the mind or brainā existing and considered in the causal nexus for determining lack of mental capacity and b) whether that impairment was of a nature to determine the person is of āunsound mindā, which as we know from caselaw should be considered the same as āmental disorderā in the broad sense (not psychiatric disorder which is more defined). If the two are not synoymous then the current authorisation in my view would be invalid.
The other question of course since they all seem to agree the individual lacks the capacity to make the relevant decisions, is that a lack of capacity cannot arise in isolation without an impairment of mind of some description; so ticking the box of no mental disorder makes little sense.