The nature and scope of palliative psychiatry and associated ethical implications are debated in the literature. This article examines conceptual limitations of extant accounts of palliative psychiatry, with a focus on psychopharmacological practice, and suggests that modifiable and unmodifiable psychiatric…
Treatment-resistant schizophrenia can create a high disease burden for some patients, making it challenging for all involved to navigate a good outcome. Such cases require physicians to regard symptom eradication and treatment success as the same. This commentary on a…
Mental health professionals’ moral intuitions about futility should prompt reevaluation of goals of care and care plans. Mostly, it will suffice to improve the care plan and/or slightly adjust the goal of care (eg, lower expectations), which is standard practice….
In 2008, New York Lawyers for the Public Interest filed a civil rights complaint with the New York State Office of the Attorney General on behalf of its client, Bronx Health REACH. This complaint asserts that 3 prestigious New York…
US health care is segregated by insurance status and de facto by race; however, traditional models of medical education do not teach students about segregated care, and the authors know of no examples in the literature teaching segregated care in…
Many police officers, prosecutors, defense attorneys, judges, and parole boards have reformed how their court- or carceral-based work with patients who have mental illness proceeds. This article discusses how policies and protocols have evolved to help court and carceral workers…
Police officers and clinicians are exposed to a broad range of moral risks in the field. When they perceive that a moral transgression has been committed by an agent responding to those risks, they are susceptible to moral injury. This…
A clinician’s standard primary role is to treat and monitor their patients’ health and to be their ally. Clinicians with obligations to patients and to organizations, however, must also assess patients for nontherapeutic purposes (eg, readiness to resume work). These…
Ethical obligations to minimize harms and maximize benefits of diagnosis and treatment of disorders without biomarkers include navigating difficult-to-measure, perhaps clinically inexplicable, symptoms. Among potential harms are public stigma, self-stigma, label avoidance, and the negative influence these stigmas have on…
Medications, like all interventions, shape the ways in which physicians see disease, provide care, define successful outcomes, and organize health care systems. Pharmaceuticals make symptoms and biological drug targets more visible while rendering individuals and their social suffering invisible, thereby…
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