Informed consent and psychiatric research.

The general problem with research is that its purpose does not necessarily benefit an individual patient now. In psychiatry the specific problem is that psychiatric patients may have a reduced mental competence, because of their illness. Thus the specific clinical problems of the research subjects may impede the ethical requirements of the research. To try to solve this conundrum, we may need to move away from a vision of psychiatric ethics which is rights and individual based, and find another, which understand that ethical decision are made in the context of relationship: psychiatrist-patient, patient-society, analyst-patient, psychiatrist-society.