Cynthia M. A. Geppert, MD, PhD, MPH

The authors discuss two fundamental misconceptions: the myth of the patient’s autonomy, and the myth of the incurability of the patient’s illness.

Severe alcohol dependence and frequent relapses in this patient prompts his son to produce a durable power of attorney for health care. He demands that the physicians declare his father to lack decision-making capacity. More in this ethics case report.

How often are you confronted with an ethical dilemma in your clinical practice? How comfortable—and how prepared—are you to deal with these issues? Those are just a few of the questions posed in the Psychiatric Times Ethics Survey—a survey that turned out to be the largest ever of its kind.

The goal of the survey was to go beyond ethical lessons, useful as these may be, and to learn how Psychiatric Times’ readers—who are on the front line of psychiatric practice—handle a series of hypothetical ethical scenarios.