By Patrick Suraci
The HuffingtonPost.com
I always wondered why universities deemed it necessary to teach Ethics courses. Wasn't this something you learned from your parents and childhood, as your superego, in Freudian terms, developed? Now I have learned the need to teach many people without values, especially narcissists, the ethical impact of their behavior towards other people.
This was made clear when I recently published
Sybil In Her Own Words: The Untold Story of Shirley Mason, Her Multiple Personalities and Paintings. It is a follow-up to the case of a woman who had 16 personalities, then called Multiple Personality Disorder. Flora Schreiber wrote this story titled
Sybil. The therapist, Dr. Cornelia Wilbur used unorthodox, but not unethical, treatment for ten years, such as, psychoanalysis, hypnosis and Sodium Pentothal which resulted in the complete integration of the 16 personalities. Sybil was the pseudonym for Shirley Mason who was born on January 25, 1923, in Dodge Center, Minnesota. She was an artistically gifted and shy only child. Her family was well known in this little town; therefore, her mother's bizarre behavior was overlooked. During Shirley's treatment the alternate personalities emerged and told of the abuse by her mother. Whenever her mother committed an atrocious attack on Shirley, she would split and development another personality to cope with the trauma.
Attacking the veracity of
Sybil published in 1973 did not begin until April 24,1997, when Dr. Herbert Spiegel gave an interview to the
New York Review of Books. He stated that Sybil was not a multiple, but rather an hysteric. He claimed to have hypnotized her, performed regression studies and filmed her for the class he taught at Columbia University, thus, discovering that Sybil's therapist, Dr. Cornelia Wilbur, had been: "helping her (Sybil) identifying aspects of her life, or perspectives, that she then called by name. By naming them this way she was reifying a memory of some kind and converting it into a 'personality'..." In fact, he accused Dr. Wilbur of implanting false memories, giving credence to this developing fanatical movement.
There entire article is
here.
Another post on this topic can be found
here.
The participation of patients in healthcare-related decisions is an ethical imperative that patient organizations and treatment guidelines promote. The mental health guidelines for most major psychiatric disorders, such as depression or schizophrenia, strongly recommend the inclusion of patients in all healthcare decisions,[1, 2] but Alzheimer's disease (AD) is an exception in this regard; although guidelines emphasize the disclosure of diagnosis and stress patient independence as a major aim, they consider impaired decisional capacity to be a limiting factor for patient participation at the same time.[3] Although AD is characterized by a cognitive decline that impairs the participation in medical decision-making,[4, 5] decisional capacity for important medical and social decisions might still be intact in patients in the early clinical stages of AD.[6] Important medical and social decisions that need to be made in these early stages are the introduction of an advance directive, a decision about driving, the initiation of antidementia treatment, and participation in clinical trials. Preventing patients from participating in these decisions not only reduces patient autonomy, but also risks ignoring the patients' will while they are still capable of making decisions, which might result in postponed decisions until decisional capacity has been lost.