Ethics and Psychiatry: East Versus West

Abstract

Psychiatric patients are more vulnerable than most other patient groups. Their illness stigmatizes and renders them mostly powerless in society. In terms of social status they occupy the lower rungs of society. Apart from a few wealthier and/ or more enlightened Asian countries, in many other countries many severely ill psychiatric patients are indigent, and with poorly funded public social services, if they have no caring family to help, the mentally ill are left to wander the streets, sleep in five-foot ways or under bridges. Many are abused; others are incarcerated in unhygienic and stultifying nursing homes or psychiatric institutions. In such circumstances, because they are voiceless and powerless, no other group of patients needs more a thoroughly ethical approach to caring. Ethics protects the helpless and upholds the dignity of the person. At the outset a curious reader might wonder on what basis ethical rules of practice are drawn up. If East is different from West, do they have different guiding principles? This, as the reader would be aware, is not as simple a question as it appears at first. What is the basis of ethics? Is there a moral law underlying ethics? If so, whose law? Is it the belief in God that gives weight to this law? We neither have the space here, nor the expertise of a moral philosopher or ethicist, to discuss these questions apart from making a brief comment. We think it is reasonable to say that there are some differences between East and West partly due to the increasing secularization of western society (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2015 APA, all rights reserved)