Mad Ethics: What can mental health patients teach us about clinical ethics?
Friday, October 13, 2023
5:00 PM – 6:15 PM ET
Location: Essex C (Fourth Floor)
This presentation introduces Mad(ness) Ethics and how these ethics might be brought to bear on healthcare to inform different approaches to clinical ethics consultation that destructuralize the ableism/sanism built into bioethics and biomedicine. Mad Ethics are characterized by: (1) a critical relationship to dominant narratives concerning madness; (2) theory and practice privileging Mad people’s knowledge and rooted in the long histories, cultures, and scholarship of the psychiatric consumer/survivor movement and the academic discipline of Mad Studies; and (3) inquiry committed to increasing equity and justice for Mad people (adapted from Reynolds & Wieseler, 2022). This session will contrast Mad Ethics with commonly practiced clinical ethics, such as their significantly different approach to ethical questions, principles, and decision-making. It will then apply Mad Ethics to several examples to illustrate ethical issues arising from sanism that often remain unacknowledged by clinical ethics services. In doing so, I propose several ways that Mad Ethics might inform what clinical ethicists recognize as ethical issues, how we think about and respond to moral distress, and the importance of extending our collaborations to include patient partners and peer support programs. Mad Ethics ultimately encourage us to affirm patients’ ethics in their totality as Ethics and to do ethics ‘with’ patients from their perspective. Such an approach stands in contrast to clinical ethics’ common practices of extracting, decoupling, abstracting, and reinterpreting patient values, wishes, and beliefs to serve the ethics we commonly do ‘to’ or ‘about’ them to support clinicians and the operations of health institutions.