Willingness and competence of depressed and schizophrenic inpatients to consent to research.

In this study, the willingness of psychiatric inpatients to volunteer for research and their capacity to consent to and distinguish between protocols offering different levels of risk and benefit were assessed. Twenty-two inpatients with major depressive disorder, 21 inpatients with schizophrenia, and 21 community control subjects were asked to consider participation in a lower-risk study offering the potential for direct medical benefit and a higher-risk study offering no direct medical benefit. Consent-related capacities were assessed with the MacArthur Competence Assessment Tool-Clinical Research. Depressed inpatients, while having a greater degree of impairment than control subjects, still demonstrated relatively high decision-making capacity and were able to distinguish levels of risk between studies. Their pattern of preferences did not differ from control subjects. However, they were more likely to decline to participate in the research, being six times more likely to decline the lower-risk study and 1.4 times more likely to decline the higher-risk study. Schizophrenic subjects demonstrated greater impairments in decision-making capacity and were even more likely than depressed subjects to decline to participate.