Decision Making in Psychiatric Patients: A Qualitative Study with Focus Groups

It has been said that mental illnesses are characterised by poor decision making; there is some neuroscientific evidence of specific alterations in performance in decision making tests, but little is known about how patients make choices about their own treatments.

Focus groups with patients from two psychiatric clinics, with discourse analysis.

Five deductive categories (tools, capacity, therapeutic relationship, method and family and network), plus one additional category from the analysis (stigma), and 35 inductive (posterior) categories were considered. The categories are analysed and the findings presented.

Patients express a need for greater participation in decisions about their treatment, and a more symmetrical psychiatrist-patient relationship, involving families. Decisions may be changed due to stigma, barriers to treatment access, and previous experiences.