What Is Informed Consent Used For In Psychotherapy?
It is estimated that, worldwide, one in 4 people has suffered from a mental health problem throughout their life. This translates into some 700 million patients who require some type of psychological help and who, unfortunately, in many cases do not receive.
In any case, it is true that the field of psychological help has advanced a lot in recent decades, despite these discouraging figures. Emotional and behavioral problems in human beings are seen less and less as a weakness and, therefore, many people are currently open to receiving help and seeking substantial changes in their lives beyond the physical.
Once an individual enters the consultation, a tacit contract is produced between the professional and the patient, in which the latter authorizes, based on his or her own freedom, the interventions that are going to be performed. This pact is not a mere ethereal social construct: we are talking about the explanation of a process with the subsequent filling out of a form. These acts are included in the term known as “informed consent” (IC), and here we will see what it is for and how it works..
We start with the basics, because talking about informed consent without knowing why it is done can generate more confusion than anything else. Psychotherapy is defined as a scientific treatment (of a psychological nature) that, based on physical or psychological manifestations of discomfort in the patient, promotes a series of changes and modifications in your behavior in order to achieve a general state of well-being.
Psychotherapy promotes changes consistent with the objectives that the patient wishes to achieve. To put it more closely, it provides the individual with a kind of “order in chaos,” facilitating the understanding of ideas or acts that previously seemed confusing. By allowing the understanding of the negative elements that surround us, the patient feels relieved, since at the end of the treatment he will be able to face sensations and anxieties that are difficult to understand that had previously been avoided.
In addition to all this, the techniques that emerge from psychotherapy promote the patient to learn different ways of thinking, feeling and acting, thus discarding previously learned behaviors that hinder their well-being. In short, it is not only about fixing the problems that address the life of the individual per se, but about replacing the feeling of discomfort with one of personal mastery and control.
On the other hand, in Psychological intervention implies the fact that it is necessary to inform the patient about the objectives and procedures of the therapy; That’s where the role of informed consent comes into play.
What is informed consent?
For its part, informed consent (IC) is a process by which It is guaranteed that the patient has expressed his or her willingness to consciously participate in psychotherapeutic research.. The regulation of informed consent is included in Law 41/2002, of November 14, the basic regulator of patient autonomy and rights and obligations regarding clinical information and documentation. Every inhabitant can consult these documents and many more in the Official State Gazette (BOE) of the Government of Spain.
There is a clear confusion in the general population between the verbal process carried out by the professional who is going to carry out the therapy and the IC document itself. The psychotherapist must inform the patient about the processes that will be carried out during the treatment, in one or multiple interviews, always in a clear and understandable way. This process is gradual and unique in each case and, therefore, cannot be exemplified on paper in a standardized way.
What does show the role that part of the informed consent represents is that This transmission of information has taken place between professional and patient. In other words and according to official medical sources: the document is not the information, but the guarantee that it has been produced. So, what should a psychotherapist inform the patient about before starting treatment?
Information that must be provided in the informed consent
Although it does not appear in the document itself, Every psychotherapist must inform the patient of some minimums, based on their personal inclinations.. Some people are very distrustful and want to know a lot about the processes that are going to be carried out, while others tend toward hypochondria and, for fear of worrying too much, decide to know what is just and necessary. Both are respectable positions, so the type and amount of information provided must be adjusted to each case.
In any case, there are a series of things that every patient should know when starting a psychotherapy treatment. In this list we show them to you:
It is necessary to know that There are multiple models of informed consent in psychotherapy, so it is practically impossible to cover each and every one of them in a few lines. What must be clear, in each and every case, is that the patient’s decision and how much information he or she wishes to receive must be respected.
The Las Condes Clinical Medical Journal, regarding this topic, makes a more than accurate note: the professional’s duty to inform the patient does not imply imposing the information that the professional, a scientific society or the administration or management has decided for everyone. the cases. The limits are set by you as a patient, and not by a standardized process.
The requirements for informed consent to be valid
Although the amount of information provided may be variable in each case, not all scenarios are valid to consider informed consent as correct and ethical.
The first characteristic that all CIs must meet is the patient’s ability to make decisions.that is, that he can consciously discern whether or not he wants to undergo the proposed treatment.
Beyond this capacity for distinction, there must be voluntariness. Informed consent is useless if the subject acts based on persuasion. Therefore, the psychotherapeutic approach cannot be proposed by people in authority and is not valid if the individual is not given enough time to reflect, consult with external agents and finally decide if they want to be part (or not) of the research. .
Lastly, also Two final pillars are necessary that we have already explored: information and understanding. Whatever the amount of information provided, the patient must be able to understand it and be able to act on it, without exceptions. In any case, at this point it is necessary to take a stand in favor of psychotherapists: the freedom of the patient does not imply that he can impose on the doctor everything he wishes.
As a professional and free entity, the doctor/psychotherapist can decide not to carry out harmful or medically useless interventions on the patient. Beyond this ability to choose, professionals must actively reject any proposal that represents harm to the patient, selecting only the approach to be carried out based on their knowledge criteria.
Summary
As you have seen, Informed consent in psychotherapy is not just a role, but a procedure which culminates with the signing of a document by the patient. In order for him to decide, he is given a quantity of essential information (to a greater or lesser extent) that informs him of the functionality and objective of the treatment to which he is going to potentially undergo. The CI is based on voluntariness and understanding: if the patient is coerced or lacks information, its usefulness is null.
In any case, it is necessary to highlight that the IC is in no way useful for the professional to wash his hands if he incurs medical misconduct. Nor is it a mere administrative act that remains in the first consultation, but is in force in each and every one of the steps that cement the professional-patient objective that has been set.
How to automatically manage informed consent if you are a psychologist?
Eholo is a new management software by and for psychologistsa digital platform that more than 3,000 professionals already trust to optimize their time and improve their performance in various areas of their daily work.
With Eholo you will be able to keep your billing up to date, bill automatically without wasting time, issue and file informed consent in an organized manner, quickly calculate commissions for each professional, organize the agenda and have an up-to-date clinical history for each patient, and transcribe files audio, among other functions.
With the Eholo agenda you will be able to clearly identify the session calendars, the payments made in each session, the visits made and also those cancelled.
