The Right to Participate in Decision Making: Supported Decision Making in Practice

Ideas about capacity and incapacity have dominated thinking about participation in decision making by people with intellectual disabilities. The United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities provoked interest in the concept of supported decision making and the rights of all people with disabilities to be involved in making decisions about their own lives. Decisions vary in many ways—scope, individual significance or time frame—as does the type of support needed to participate in making them. This chapter reviews the contested nature of supported decision making and proposes a principled approach that puts the will and preferences of the person with disability at the centre of all decisions and includes all people with disabilities irrespective of whether they can express their preferences or rely on others to interpret them. It alerts service providers to the varied landscapes of decisions making and explains an evidence based practice framework for supporting decision making that is applicable across all types of decisions and contexts.