Reflections on ethical issues in psychopharmacology: an American perspective

Psychopharmacology has revolutionized psychiatric practice but raises a number of ethical issues. This review from an American perspective first describes ethics analyses and attempts to portray the ethical practitioner. Pressures that interfere with appropriate prescribing come from outside the prescriber and from within, including from insurers, other treatment staff and the prescriber's own will to act for the patient. Clinicians also face binds in which alternate choices seem to have merit and leave the prescriber feeling pulled in contradictory directions, frequently related to risk-benefit dilemmas. The ethics of psychopharmacology poses many questions that cannot yet be answered at the current state of the field. Pharmacology also seems to promote extremes of attitudes, such as "All such drugs are poisons" and the like. This review then provides some risk management principles, and concludes that such a review, though not comprehensive, may serve to open questions that are not always considered by clinicians.