Ethics at the Intersection of Mental Health and the Law

Clinicians regularly face ethical dilemmas that challenge their personal and professional boundaries, such as accepting gifts, interacting with patients or evaluees in social settings, and managing differing expectations of patients and evaluees. This chapter describes how various ethical theories and models, such as principlism, virtue theory, deontology, consequentialism, communitarian ethics, narrative ethics, and boundary models, can be applied to assist physicians, therapists, social workers, and other clinicians whose practice brings them to the interface of mental health and the law. It addresses some aspects of clinical practice in which the expectations of the evaluee or clinician may not coincide with the expectations of the law. It describes a modern professionalism that integrates the various ethical approaches and offers the greatest likelihood of success in negotiating the complex issues arising at the interface of mental health practice and the law while incorporating sensitivity to culture, language, gender, and prior experiences.