Ethical Issues in Mental Healthcare - Essay Example

Ethical Issues in Mental Healthcare Ethical Issues in Mental Healthcare Ethical principles are the rules and regulations which are responsible for distinguishing humans from other organisms. The humans are blessed with an entity that is called conscious and conscious keeps people telling about the right path in life. Whenever, individuals get ready for facing some challenge in life then thousand voices cover their heads and even their minds with negative thoughts and these thoughts guide people to wait for the right moment because they are not ready. However, there is that smallest voice which falls apart and shouts to the person’s ears that hey, you are ready go ahead and that is voice of what we know as conscious. Humans need a moral context before they do or do not do something. Ethics are well integrated in every part and aspect of human way of life for example a pitcher in the sport of basketball waits for the batter to settle before pitching but there is no a single rule in the rulebook that bounds the pitcher to wait for batter’s readiness. The modern law is now respecting conventional behaviors and it has based the development of tort contract on the basis of communal commonsense (Fan, 2000). Additionally, psycho clinical situations are based on trust and clients share their sensitive information with the therapist and great responsibility of not unnecessarily sharing secrets of oneself with others lies on to the shoulders of the psychologist. Again right of privacy is more of an ethical convention than a rule because therapists in the light of their past and current experience came to know that if they do not respect right to privacy of their clients then they do more harm than good. The Hippocratic Oath gets activated and therefore, psychologists, psychiatrists and psychosocial therapist should not indulge them in behaviors that hurt their society. Therapists face another challenge of telling the truth to their patients whereas, they do not have to hurt them to an extent where they decide to quit the therapy altogether. In modern psychology, therapists are guided to wait for the right moment to tell the truth rather than telling it upfront because it will do emotional harm to their clients. They are required to create a mutual understanding that the practice of therapy is being carried to increase patients’ quality of life and once patients realize that a psychologist is his or her last resort before self-harm (Teale, 1955) then he or she becomes susceptible towards the therapeutic intervention and finally, began to treat truth as a fact and before that all of them treat their real condition as a dream and as an illusion. The psychologist has to change the reality of the clients and he or she has to tell them that all things are one and they are the essential part of this entire universe and there is no doubt that their good days will come. Eventually, what a therapist gives his or her patients besides medicines is the gift of unshakable faith on God and they also guide them to believe in the generosity of the world’s natural infrastructure that is designed to reward their efforts sooner or later. An effective therapist supports the presence of individualism and personal freedom in the mindset of the disturbed person. According to psychological theory, humans experience dissatisfaction when they stop growing and the notion of growth is strongly and firmly associated with the sub-concept of action so therapists are there to help people in the process of overcoming stagnation by forcing them to move on. It is often argued that life can only be lived in one direction which is forward. Psychotherapists are indeed practitioners of an inexact science because they cannot do anything in terms of bettering one’s life but they help him or her in getting over pains of the past which keep haunting present (Szasz, 1958) and therefore, destroy the future as well. Psychologists are ethically and even legally righteous in getting paid for their services because they tend to suffer along with their clients and for which they have to be paid because after all another’s pain and suffering is not theirs in reality. The theory of social exchange is applied in every human relation and psychotherapy is no different in this regard because therapist suffers along with the patient in order to get paid. In addition, it is important to note that most of therapists are known to be generous enough to forego their payments in order to become capable of helping the pained humanity that cannot afford their services. An optimistic school of thought in psychology, tends to establish themselves as practitioners of love and according to them, love cannot be sold or purchased. However, it can be shared. The traditional psychologist’s viewpoint is conventional in nature because it does not allow therapists to forge sexual relationships with clients and therefore, cold and unemotional attitudes and behaviors should be demonstrated while giving therapy to someone. The modern psychology is of the view that without warmth any human relation is as cold as ice (Teale, 1955) and because of this reason, every therapeutic relationship should be spiced up with the help of showing reasonable level of emotions. Research on emotions revealed the fact that people are not getting hurt due to ruthless behaviors of the society but they are being injured due to presence of hate, anger and discrimination and all of these attributes are associated with strong set of emotions. In short, it is being proposed that psychology needs to get more humanized in order to be effective. Humans have to act in a socially acceptable ways and it translates into the practical application of normative ethics in the society. Additionally, psychologists should mold their practice according to cultural realities of the geographical areas in which they are operating in order to better quality of life. In case of collective culture, humans live for others and they are taught and told to suppress their personal needs in order to serve others (Sullivan, Menapace, & White, 2001). Simply, it means that “Needs of the many outweigh those of the few”. No matter how ruthless, mean and nasty abovementioned statement appears but it still remains the prominent way of life in many regions of the world. Psychologists have to guide those who had to live in collective culture to succumb to social norms in order to live a satisfactory life and it is rather great to live a peaceful life than living like dying everything. The collective and underdeveloped areas are notorious for sporting judgmental behaviors and attitudes. The primal job of a psychologist is to make lives livable for those who are in pain. They have to present a soft frontier to the pained humans so that they can resolve their unresolved emotions in a peaceful setting. In individualistic cultures, people are more educated and therefore, they do not consider psychologists as rebellious as they are in the collective nations of the world. Parents in the previously mentioned cultural setting like to see their children satisfied with their lives. They send them into psychotherapies so that their kids can be helped in the process of living a contented life (Mackinnon, 2007). Psychologists have to create a cozy environment in their offices so that people can feel relaxed while having a discussion about their problems. The ambiance and environment is characterized with the ability to facilitate healing in terms of physical and psychological health. Normative ethics are in isolation considered as a guarantee of success for any kind of therapist practicing in multitude of cultural settings. The ethics are a subjective matter but for a psychologist, it has an objective nature because humans come to them after going a lot of suffering and it is inflicted by unethical attitudes and behaviors of people. The psychologist has the job to play the role of society’s consciousness. The negative practices of the community are challenged by social scientists and the traditional therapists are there to assist creation of personal happiness rather than focusing on solving social problems and issues. The intensive level of rights is provided to patients by psychological ethical code of conduct. The patients can sue a psychological practitioner upon finding his or her services unsatisfactory in nature. The patient has undisputed right to privacy in every culture but its application varies from community to community. In underdeveloped communities which are often plagued with lower literacy rates fall behind regarding allowing quality psychological services to prevail whereas, educated social systems like to see their people grow in financial and spiritual terms and therefore, they are supporting psychologists to play their due role in the causing the people’s growth and betterment (Fan, 2000). Furthermore, patients preserve the right to quit psychotherapies at their will and whenever they feel uncomfortable with it. They have the right to report sexual advances of a psychotherapist to the court of law and that can result in cancelation of license of the involved practitioner (Jackson, 2009). Moreover, psychologists do provide their services to troubled relationships but these services are not promoted more prominently because in major number of cases, the fate of marriages is already decided and therapists work their way in order to cause revitalization of sex-life of the fragile relation and upon failing to do so they simply play the role of a divorce lawyer in an informal fashion. Human nature is by default hungry for love and affection and if one’s close ones are not paying enough attention to him or her and if families dare to take care of trouble then psychologists and therapists will die out of hunger and that is for sure. In summary, humans need love in order to survive and love can be measured by a few instruments. However, these instruments are not in the scope of this paper. It is suffice to say that psychologists are there to help and once a psychologist told an illegal immigrant that he is from a good country and that is the essence of each healthcare professional’s being. Helping others hit oneself like cocaine (Peck, 2005) and a true healthcare professional is literally addicted to helping others because it is their personal method of getting high. Finally, a successful therapy creates a counselor as the passion of helping others gets transferred from the practitioner to patient and in the longer run perspective, very few of the patients emerge as successful therapists because it involves thinking and suffering a lot. References Fan, R. 2000. Truth Telling to the Patient: Cultural Diversity and the East Asian Perspective. Bioethics in Asia Vol 1 No.1, 107-109. Jackson, T. 2009. From Civil Rights to Human Rights: Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Struggle for Economic Justice (Politics and Culture in Modern America). University of Pennsylvania Press, Pennsylvania. Mackinnon, B. 2007. Ethics: Theory and Contemporary Issues. Wadsworth Publishing, New York. Peck, S. 2005. The Road Less Traveled: A New Psychology of Love, Traditional Values, and Spiritual Growth.Simon & Schuster, New York. Sullivan, R., Menapace, & White, R. 2001. Truth-telling and patient diagnoses. Journal of Medical Ethics Vol 27 No.3, 192-197. Szasz, T. 1958. Psychiatry, Ethics, and the Criminal Law. Columbia Law Review Vol 58 No.2, pp. 183-198. Teale, A. E. 1955. Ethics and Psychology . The Sociological Review Vol 3 No.1, 31–42,. Read More