Objective The study examined the outcome of psychiatric inpatient care in terms of patients'
reports of ethical benefits, which were defined as fulfillment of the ethical principles of …

Autonomy is an important concept in ethical and political theory and arguably a central
concept in bioethics. Its implications for psychiatry are clearest in cases in which …

This paper examines the potential for advance directives to be used by people with mental
illness. Also known as a 'living will', an advance directive enables a competent person to …

The standard bioethics account is that respecting patient autonomy means ensuring that
patients make their own decisions, and that requires that they give informed consent. In fact …

A society that is sensitive to rights is, for that reason, sensitive to persons. On one level,
rights function as a meta-possession: a grounding for the possibility of an individual's …

The courts' assumption that patients' refusals of treatment are based on autonomous
decision making was evaluated by examining the opinions of 24 involuntarily medicated …

Mental health laws in many jurisdictions currently permit coercive treatment for persons with
mental illness who are thought to be at risk of harm to themselves or others. These laws are …

Psychiatry has a paradoxical place in biomedical ethics. As a practical discipline it is
perhaps more problematic ethically than any other branch of medicine so much so that some …

In the mental health law debate over justification for civil commitment of mentally ill persons,
coercion has been a central issue. Participants in the debate have tended to separate into …

The authors survey the ethical problems confronting psychiatry today. They state that with
rare exceptions psychiatric intervention can be morally justified only with the potential …