Thinking ahead in mental health
Using your past to plan your future
This website will explain what Advance Choice Documents are and how they can help.
Advance Choice Documents give people living with severe mental illness an opportunity to state your wishes and instructions about your treatment and care during future episodes of illness. They give you a chance to make your voice heard in future mental healthcare decisions by using your knowledge, gained through past experience of illness and healthcare, to guide a clinical team through future episodes of illness.
The videos and resources below will guide you through how to create an Advance Choice Document, store and update them, help others to access them, and what your rights are when it comes to using them.
Advance Choice Documents can only help people if they are aware of them and know how to create one. To everyone living with severe mental health conditions, either yourself, your family and friends, or those helping to provide care for people with severe mental health conditions - if you find these videos and this website helpful, please do share it with anyone who you think might be interested and help us to spread awareness.
Please click on any of the icons below to be taken through to the video that will help to explain each topic further.
Video 1: What is an Advance Choice Document?
Video 2: How can they help?
Video 3: Planning
Video 4: What to include about healthcare
Video 5: Other things to include
Video 6: Minoritised racial and ethnic groups
Video 7: Perinatal (pregnancy or after-birth)
Video 8: Older adults
Video 9: ‘Self-binding’ directives
Above are a set of short instructional videos, made by a team of people with lived experience of mental illness, researchers, and health care professionals - our aim is to help empower people living with mental illness, their families, friends, and healthcare providers, to work together to plan treatment in advance of becoming unwell.
The first 5 videos give a general introduction to Advance Choice Documents and explain what they are, how they can help, planning, key healthcare-related things to include and other important things you might want to include. The next 3 videos look at how Advance Choice Documents might be particularly useful for people from different groups or at different stages in life.
Finally, there is a video on 'self-binding' directives, a special type of Advance Choice Document for people who want to try to ensure that they receive treatment when very unwell, even if they do not want it at the time.
Would you like a simple ACD template?
When clicking on the above buttons a template will automatically be downloaded to your computer and will be accessible in your downloads. If you are having trouble with downloads it may be due to a pop-up blocker which you’ll need to give permission to access.
Below is a simple document which explains how to fill in an ‘Advance Choice’ document. It is designed to provide key information to health professionals about contacts, treatment and other care issues, including relevant physical health issues.
You can complete and expand this form as you need to.