Confidentiality with minor clients: Issues and guidelines for therapists.

This paper describes the development and results of a method for capturing client outcomes of community services for persons with severe mental illness. Through the use of status scales, two major elements of community integration, independence of living arrangement and vocational independence can be continuously monitored. The initial results of the method include: unifying previously disparate agendas of state and local officials, enhanced vocational and living arrangement outcomes for clients, instigating program improvements, and the increased exchange of staff rewards. In addition, the method is economical whereby data on a worker caseload of 30–40 can be collected in about 20 minutes.

Client outcome reporting: the status method.

Unlike specialists in other areas of medicine, psychiatrists are often faced with having to treat patients against their will. Lack of awareness of their illness and lack of motivation to seek trea...

Taking the Suspected Mentally Ill off the Streets to Public General Hospitals

Although social work students and practitioners readily identify self-determination as a core value and ethical standard, they are less likely to be aware of the parameters constituting informed consent, and how it applies to the multicultural context of many therapy situations. This article draws on the areas of ethics and law to show how they intersect with the needs of a diverse, multicultural client group that encompasses the poor, the elderly, immigrants, and those in ethnic and racial minority populations. It presents informed consent as a process that enhances, supports, and facilitates personal autonomy and interpersonal and social relationships in multicultural social work practice.

The Ethics of Informed Consent

In the past, the legal and medical perspectives on issues relating to compulsory treatment focused on the individual's interest in liberty on the one hand and the physician's authority to treat on the other. Neither of these perspectives addresses the contemporary realities of treatment of chronically mentally ill people in the United States. The author suggests an emerging advocacy perspective that focuses on the quality of treatment.

Stanley S. Herr

Papers

Legal Rights and Mental Health Care