Support instruments for people in mental health crisis

The subject of considerations in the article are issues related to the problems occurring in the professional work of social workers, who, repeatedly, deal with interventions for people with mental disorders, who most often do not want to undergo treatment. Increasingly, families claim that the best solution would be to incapacitate such a family member. In addition, the draft act amending the Mental Health Protection Act assumes that doctors will put pressure on family members to use the incapacitation procedure. The aim of this article is to show that incapacitation should be a last resort and to present various forms of support and help for both the patient and family members. The basic research method was the dogmatic method, i.e., formal and legal, involving the use of the existing achievements of law science, which is based on the analysis of legal texts in this area. The assessment of this issue was subject to examination of the current legislation and courts decisions in this respect. Considerations on the necessity of incapacitation are presented in three parts. The first one discusses the importance of protection of health, including mental health, which is protected not only constitutionally, but also under other laws. The second part defines the essence of partial and total incapacitation, its process, entities that may apply for incapacitation. I present legal consequences for an incapacitated person as well as consequences for a person applying for incapacitation recklessly or in bad faith. I answer the question whether a register of incapacitated persons should be established. In the third part, I describe the procedure of application for admission to a psychiatric hospital, which may be carried out, inter alia, by a social worker, a wide range of financial, institutional and social work assistance that can be guaranteed by the social support body for the sick person, so that incapacitation is the extreme measure. The result of this article is to demonstrate that social assistance organisational units, including a social worker and families, have various instruments to support a person in a mental health crisis.