COFAR blog

A juggernaut of support has been building in Massachusetts and around the country to replace guardians of persons with developmental disabilities with more informal “support networks” of advisors.

Yet, the growing movement behind “Supported Decision Making” (SDM) appears to be primarily ideological, and little research appears to have been done on the impact of SDM on disabled individuals and their families.

Under SDM, individual guardians are replaced by teams or “network supporters,” who enter into written agreements with disabled individuals to “help them make decisions” about their care, finances, living arrangements and other areas.

Proponents of SDM claim that it restores the right of disabled and elderly persons who are under guardianship to make their own life decisions with help, if needed, from networks of supporters. That right has been overly curtailed by guardians, the SDM proponents maintain.

Even the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities included language in 2008 “that embraces supported decision-making and which is seen by some as requiring nations to adopt supported decision-making mechanisms,” according to a 2013 article on SDM in the Penn State Law Review.

Still, not everyone is convinced that all guardianships should be terminated, or that they should be replaced by SDM. As that same law journal article by Nina A. Kohn, Jeremy A. Blumenthal, and Amy T. Campbell, noted, “…despite much rhetoric touting its (SDM’s) advantages, little is known about how supported decision-making processes operate or about the outcomes of those processes.”

Without more information, the 2013 article stated,

…it is impossible to know whether supported decision-making actually empowers persons with cognitive and intellectual disabilities. Furthermore, there is reason to be concerned that supported decision-making might actually have the opposite effect, disempowering such individuals or making them more vulnerable to manipulation, coercion, or abuse.

COFAR has raised concerns about SDM, contending it could marginalize family members as decision makers in the care of their loved ones with developmental disabilities. COFAR has also raised a concern that SDM networks can potentially include service providers – a situation that would appear to pose a conflict of interest if the provider is also providing services to an individual for whom it is participating in an SDM network.

In Massachusetts, the state Senate included a provision in the state’s Fiscal 2019 budget last spring for a commission to study replacing guardianship in the state with SDM. (S.2530). While such a study would ordinarily be welcome, the proposed study commission under the budget legislation appeared to be comprised primarily of SDM supporters. And while the study was not included in the final state budget, its proponents will no doubt keep trying to insert a similar study commission in future budgets.   

The SDM study commission would have included representatives from the Arc of Massachusetts, the Center for Public Representation, and other SDM proponents, including Mass. Advocates Standing Strong and the National Association to Stop Guardianship Abuse.

COFAR would support a commission to study SDM. But it should be an impartial study, and not dominated by anti-guardianship organizations.

Massachusetts also appears to have been moving in the direction of SDM in recent years with the adoption of “person-centered planning,” a process that also appears to lack oversight and to have the potential to put much of the decision-making power over an individual’s funds into the hands of private companies.

Yet, even major legal organizations such as the American Bar Association appear to have made up their minds in favor of SDM; and like many other SDM proponents, the ABA appears to be basing its position on ideology rather than research or clinical standards.

In email exchanges with COFAR in September and last month, Dari Pogach, an attorney with the ABA’s Commission on Law and Aging, implied that a guardian may not be necessary even for some persons with severe or profound intellectual or developmental disabilities.

Pogach stated that the decision to replace an individual’s guardian with an SDM network should be based on the person’s ability make their own decisions. Yet, no clinical diagnosis or standard of cognitive ability is necessary to make that determination, she wrote.

The paradox of SDM

The view that no clinical diagnosis is needed in determining whether an individual is capable of making their own decisions appears to be linked to the ideological position of many SDM proponents that virtually all persons, no matter how cognitively impaired they might be, are capable of making life decisions.

Yet, in their Penn State Law Review article, Kohn et al. pointed out that:

…there is a potentially unavoidable paradox in acknowledging that a person has diminished decision-making capacity but maintaining that he or she is nevertheless capable of meaningfully contributing to decision-making discussions and that the decisions that result from such discussions reflect his or her wishes. (my emphasis)

Kohn at al. included the following quote from a 2009 discussion paper on SDM issued by the Office of the Public Advocate in Victoria, Australia:

Can a person be assisted through information, emotional support or in some other way to make their own decisions if they do not have, for example, an appreciation of the significance of the decision they are making or a reasonably consistent set of values? 

Lack of research on outcomes of SDM

In their article, Kohn et al. said they had found no research “evaluating the quality of decisions reached using supported decision-making.” Such research is needed, and should include whether a decision increases an individual’s welfare in some way, they wrote.

Similarly, Kohn et al. stated that there has been little or no research on the demographics of guardianship and SDM. It is unknown, for instance, how many people in the United States are subject to guardianship.

While researchers have estimated that approximately 1.5 million people in the United States are subject to guardianship at any given time, Kohn et al. stated, the actual numbers are unknown, in part, because many states fail to provide the types of records that would enable a national assessment.

Kohn et al. also stated that it is unknown what portion of persons subject to guardianship are persons with intellectual disabilities, and it is unknown what percentage of guardians are “public guardians,” as opposed to family members, friends, or other third parties. It can be reasonably assumed, they stated, that most guardians are not public guardians.

To that extent, it would appear to us that SDM is primarily aimed at replacing family members of persons with developmental disabilities as guardians.

Kohn et al. further noted that research is needed on who does best at helping a developmentally disabled person to reach a “beneficial decision.” Is it family members, friends, health-care providers, or others?

Our experience has been that family members make the best guardians, and, as noted, that there is a potential conflict of interest in allowing providers to assist developmentally disabled persons in making decisions.

In fact, Kohn at al. stated that:

…when we turn to more informal arrangements such as supported decision-making, which may occur in private and with less accountability, the potential for financial or other abuse likely increases. However, data do not seem available on the incidence of such abuse in the supported decision-making context. (my emphasis)

No distinction drawn between people with different levels of disability

The Kohn article raised an additional concern that although SDM is often seen as particularly likely to benefit persons with intellectual and developmental disabilities, “a fundamental concern with these demographic data (about SDM) is that it is unclear how representative they are of individuals with ID (intellectual disability).”

Yet, even the Kohn article did not appear to fully acknowledge or recognize that people with the same type of intellectual disability may have different reactions to SDM and to guardianship depending upon the level or severity of their disability.

For instance, the Kohn article suggested that research is needed to probe whether SDM might lead to “coercive discussion processes or even abuse that might vary with the principal’s age group or type of disability.” But the article did not question whether such variations might be due to a person’s level or severity of disability.

That is an important distinction, in our view, because it would seem that SDM might work well for persons with very mild levels of intellectual disability, but would not work well with people with severe or profound levels of that same type of disability.

In sum, we think legislators, courts, and other policy makers need to slow down when it comes to guardianship reform and think more carefully about how that should be accomplished. We have listed our own reform recommendations, which we think get at the root of the problems that guardianship does pose today.

Reform of the guardianship and probate system is needed, but that doesn’t mean the system should be replaced with something that hasn’t yet been sufficiently researched.