Ethics

Hello everybody sorry this is so late.
Here are my answers to the questions:
1. A
2. D
3. D
4. C
5. D


In th readings this week I found nothing that really moved me, however after watching a little bit of TV last night and having a discusion with Jamie earlier today, I would like to respond to the show Swan. This brought many ehtical questions. In this show women with low self-esteem are given as much plastic surgery as they can handle to "make them more beautiful." All of this is done without the assessment of a psychologist. There is however a psychologist on teh show who functions as a sounding board for these women to talk about how their self esteem is low. As Jamie and I discussed we felt that this is not the role the psychologist should play. The psychologist has a duty to help these women deal with their reeaction to this drastic change and to find out how thit will help them, by not doing this the therapist is in gross negelgance of her duties. I hoped that maybe we could discuss this a little in class, i would also like to hear anyone else's reactions to this.

Answers to questions for Dawes, 1994:
1. D
2. A
3. D
4. A
5. C

I think that this article confirms what we already know, clinicians judgment is not always the best. If clincal judgement was always accurate there would be no need for reseach, because we would just intuitively kinow what to do and all of our ptients would get better. This areticle provides a strong argument for the us of outcome measures when engaging in treatment. Without the use of these measures we are simply using our judgement as to whether not epole are getting better, and as we know our judgement is not so good in this area.
This article also provides an argument for the use of empirically validated tretments. If we have statistical information to tell us that 2/3's of the people we treat will get better when usinga certain treatment, we have more cofidence in ourselves and it also gives our patients confidence in us. They can be told the facts instead of us saying we aer going to try this an you might get better, but we are not sure if this type of treatment will work for your paricular disorder or not.

This article was very interesting. I was especially interested in two areas, first the dramatic drop in individuals who report that they have had sexual or erotic contact wtih their clients. Like Pope I wondered if there was some miracle that magically stopped people from having these relationships with their clients. I think that this topic has been publicized so much that people are just afraid that it will get back to them and they may get in trouble. Another thought that came to mind is that maybe they are trying to protect the name of Psychology. Psychologists may be afraid that the public will get a hold of this and if they do the stereotype of the Psychologist may be perpetuated. The other thing that I shocked to see was the number of therapists who attended special events like weddings of their clients. I think that this may be just as inaproriate as sexual contact with a client. Our role is not one of a friend but as we discussed in class, is one of a mentor or facilitator. By crossing this boudary we leave ourselves open to eb discredited.

On Pope's website I found some really cool and useful resources on doing forensic assessments. I want to look into teh book about the MMPI for Psychologists and Lawyers, to see what the actual content is. I am somewhat parpanoid given our discussion in class a couple of weeks ago. Is this book giving information about our tests and how to cheat on them. I will try to find more information and let everyone know.

hello here are my aswers for this week. (Pope article).
1. A
2. B
3. B
4. C
5. D
6. C
7. C
8. D
9. D
10. B
11. B
12. C

Hello everyone. I hope the CCE's are going well.

I think this article was very good. I was extremely surprised at some of the statistics (especially the one individual who reported having sexual interactions with patients 10 or more times) regarding sexual contact and behavior with clients. I was also interesting to see that the only school of thought to have investigated these issues was the Psychoanalytic school. Clearly more research needs to be done in this area, concidering this article was published in 1986. This article made me think a lot about how I would handle this issue if it came up. I also think that in our program we have had more exposure to this issue than most, given that it has been addressed in both of our ethics classes. I would be very interested to see some new statistics on this and see if other schools of thought have investigated this issue.

Answers to Pope article:
1. D
2. B
3. D
4. A
5. C
6. B
7. A
8. B
9. A
10. B

After reading the Anfang and Applebaum aticle, I relly thought about how I would deal wtih a vilent patient. I thoguht about how i was trained to address in teh informed consent that I would have to break confidentiality, if the client was suicidal or threatened violence against anothe person. I never really questioned how this would effect the relationship wtih a particular client. I know myself that I always take a threat of violence seriously, and taks time to explore this with the client before jumping to any decisions. This article brought forth some extreme examples of how Tarasoff has been extended to unusual circumstances, however i still think this ruling is to our advantage. It gives us place to look if we are unsure of what to do when this situation arises.

Hello everyone,
For some reason i just noticed that I only have questions 7 & 8 from teh article. Here are teh answers to those questions.

7. D
8. C

Answers to Monahan (1993)
1. D
2. A
3. B
4. C
5. A
6. B
7. B
8. B



Reaction to Monahan:
I thought this article was very informative and helpful. It gives a great starting point learning how to manage risk. As I read this I thought about my practicum, where I am currently on the aggresive males unit. Here there is a patient, due to his unpredicatale aggresiveness has been put on constant one to one. While he is supposed to be under constatn supervision he still manages to hit another about every other week. I was wondering after reading this article, If the family ever decided to press charges where would the responsibility lie? Would it be the psychiatrist, the psychologist or the nursing staff? Clearly all of these people are an integral part of the aggressive patients treatment.

Comment on readings:
I really appreciated the article on informed consent, I think it gave a clear and understandable idea of what informed consent should and should not be. I strongly feel that as a field we need to move toward more structured modes of intervention and should be held to high standard of care. Through good informed consent which tells the client about their options, why you are doing what you are doing, and what they can expect while you are doing it psychology as a field becomes more credible and accepted. In addition to giving the field credibility giving the client choices about the most supported therapy makes them feel as though they are in control and making an informed decision.
At first glance I thought the Bergin article was really going to upset me. I come form the stance that other than my obligation to the professional ethics code I can not make a judgment on someone else's values or value system. It is my job to treat this person and help them to be able to function better in their life regardless of what my personal values are. As I read the article I fluctuated in what my thoughts were, I personally know that I can not work with an individual whose main goal is to become a more virtuous person, I am not here to make that judgment. I think that if this is the main goal for an individual a pastoral counselor may be better equipped to handle this issue. Granted there may be some other pathology that could be treated, but I am not willing to have a debate over values with my client.

Answers to questions:
Bergin (1991)
1.c
2.b
3.b
4.d
5.a
6.d
7.b
8.b
9.b
10.d

Beahrs et al. (2001)
1.b
2.c
3.a
4.a