Competence and Vulnerability in Biomedical Research

Enhanced knowledge of the nature and causes of mental disorder have led increasingly to a need for the recruitment of ‘cognitively vulnerable’ participants in biomedical research. These individuals often fall into the ‘grey area’ between obvious decisional competence and obvious decisional incompetence and, as a result, may not be recognised as having the legal capacity to make such decisions themselves. At the core of the ethical debate surrounding the participation of cognitively vulnerab...