Applied Ethics in Mental Health Care

It has always been puzzling that more attention has not been paid to the profound ethical challenges of mental health care, posing perhaps the most difficult and thorny ethical questions in all of medicine. In this superb volume, Sisti, Caplan, and Rimon-Greenspan have gathered in one place some of the most thoughtful and incisive thinkers about the difficulties of caring for people with mental illness. Most important, the ethical considerations grapple with the lived reality of the mentally ill and those who are caring for them. Applied Ethics in Mental Health Care is an important and timely contribution to this ongoing ethical conversation.

Paul Root Wolpe, Asa Griggs Candler Professor of Bioethics and Director of the Center for Ethics, Emory University

Mental health is the area of medicine that provides the greatest and most persistent ethical challenges to practitioners. In an era that holds dear 'patient autonomy,' it routinely faces patients who suffer disorders that place the capacity for autonomy in question. In an era that holds dear individuals' rights to pursue the life paths they value, it routinely faces the challenge to distinguish what are merely unwise, or perhaps even immoral, life choices from real pathology. In this book, Sisti, Caplan, and Rimon-Greenspan offer a compendium of thoughtful, reasoned, and down-to-earth discussions of these issues and many others that face the mental health professional on a daily basis. I'm confident that mental health professionals will find themselves consulting this book regularly to help them negotiate the ethics of everyday practice. They may also want to build it into the training they give young professionals who are entering the field.

Barry Schwartz, Professor of Psychology, Swarthmore College; coauthor of Practical Wisdom: The Right Way to Do the Right Thing

This is a collection of brilliant voices and perspectives that will intrigue and challenge expert and novice alike as it shines light on the complex ethical issues engendered by the messy clinical world that is mental health care.

John Maher MD, FRCPC; Senior Editor, Journal of Ethics in Mental Health