Teaching Ethics in Psychiatry

Abstract

Those involved in teaching psychiatry undertake significant responsibility which is commonly balanced with other obligations e.g. clinical care, research and professional development. Developing the moral awareness of medical students and junior doctors is as integral to education in psychiatry as sharing knowledge, diagnostic and clinical skills. Those invited to teach ethics and facilitate the ethical development of future clinicians bear both educational privilege and power. To teach ethics is to learn ethics—the process inevitably requires the 'teacher' to reflect on, develop and grow his or her own expertise, both in ethics and in clinical practice. Ethics teaching and learning goes, as I have argued in this chapter, well beyond the boundaries of a 'core curriculum'. Messages about ethics, its content and its importance, are conveyed both deliberately in 'teaching sessions' but also unwittingly via role modelling, silently observed behaviour and responses to student concerns (Baldwin et al. 1998). As such, it is not only formally designated 'teachers of ethics' who have the power to foster professionalism, moral imagination, and courage in learners, but everyone whom a learner encounters in their clinical education. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved) (Source: chapter)