Overview: Ethical issues in contemporary psychiatry.

The authors survey the ethical problems confronting psychiatry today. They state that with rare exceptions psychiatric intervention can be morally justified only with the potential patient's informed consent. Within this framework, they discuss the fact that today nonpsychiatrists, particularly ethicists, lawyers, legislators, and social scientists, as well as psychiatrists are concerned about medical ethics, specifically regarding the right to be treated, the right not to be treated, the civil rights of psychiatric patients, the ethics of behavior control, the problem of conflicts of interest in therapeutic goals, privacy and confidentiality, the ethics of human experimentation, policy decisions, and psychiatry's relationship to the changing moral value structure of U.S. society.