Lives impacted by the Mental Capacity Act

Featured article - 02 December 2016
By Rachel Griffiths, Mental Capacity Act and human rights consultant

The vital theme of the National Mental Capacity Forum is that we must focus clearly on the lived experience of people whose lives are impacted by the Mental Capacity Act (MCA). To that end, we were honoured to share Lorraine Currie’s account of her daughter’s life following her accident: Lorraine highlights how the normal emotional chaos of being young has been, for her daughter, medicalised.

• Lorraine's personal blog

• The National Mental Capacity Forum

This young woman can’t blow all her money on a night out, since her Deputy makes sure she’s ‘sensible’. She can’t heckle the comedian at the theatre or she’d be labelled ‘disinhibited’, and she can’t comment on how handsome her physiotherapist is, or she’s being ‘sexually inappropriate.’

In this context, I’m so moved by Rebecca Armstrong’s article in the I newspaper https://inews.co.uk/author/rebecca-armstrong. Again, here is someone trying to make sense of life after a catastrophic brain injury, in this case to her husband. In one of her article's she’s writing about how – despite the changes to his personality following his accident – she can still see the ‘real Nick, the one inside who survives despite the scrambled brain and the screwed-up body. The one who has hopes and dreams, who tells jokes and charms his carers. It can be hard to see beyond the wheels and the dribble, but please look harder: he’s there.’