Ethics within Psychiatry Objective and Subjective Approach

ABSTRACT: Psychiatry remains a borderline medical discipline between social systems, individual bio-psychological balance, physiological health and law enforcement. Given all these implications, ethical implications become more complex and scientific borders can be outdated by subjective, moral or personal principles or by legal implications. From the simplest medical care to forensic psychiatry and scientific research, ethical problems are always torn between social welfare and patient’s welfare due to important particularity of the main functional unit of psychiatry: the patient with all his specific pathologic characteristics that affect civic and physiologic fundaments of social and medical bases: discernment and auto-conductivity. Whether it is a psychiatric disorder that affects the patient’s integrity or the integrity of the socio-familial matrix, the balance between social health and the patient’s life quality will end up in contradiction at some point, putting every institution involved in difficulty.

KEYWORDS: patient, psychiatry, bioethics, society, forensic