Ethics Challenges in Correctional Mental Health

Abstract

Forensic psychiatry has been developing ethics guidelines over the last 50 years. The forensic psychiatry guidelines have taken a somewhat different path from traditional medical ethics based on beneficence and nonmaleficence. In particular, for forensic psychiatrists, the ethics concept of the primacy of striving for an individual’s benefit may conflict with duties to the justice system. I posit that correctional psychiatry is a branch of forensic psychiatry that has ethics characteristics of both systems and discuss a way of resolving some of these dilemmas. Even if it is practiced by suitably qualified forensic psychiatrists, correctional psychiatry demands its own variation of ethics principles. This variation involves the additional variable of acknowledgment of the duty to the security of the institution. I develop this theory and apply it to some day-to-day ethics dilemmas with which correctional psychiatrists deal. Developing a code of ethics for correctional psychiatry is important. I apply a theoretical code of ethics to the many daily dilemmas experienced by correctional psychiatrists.