Ethics and Boundaries: Legal Issues Part I and Biological Foundations

This class meets Wisconsin requirements for ethics and professional boundaries continuing education for licensure renewal and is designed for social workers, counselors, therapists, psychologists and other helping professionals. It is offered fully online via Zoom with instructor David Mays, MD, PhD.

Day one of this course looks at the relationship between legislative and professional ethical and practice standards. All mental health professional organizations have standards defining ethical practice. These include guidelines about boundaries, principled decision-making, and professional behavior. At times, the government also weighs in, setting certain legal requirements that mental health professionals must adhere to. We will investigate the following legal principles: informed consent, the right to refuse treatment and involuntary treatment.

Day two will be about the biological origins of "ethical" behavior. The day's purpose is to help participants understand why we believe some acts are moral and some are not and how our brains complicate efforts to solve moral dilemmas. Studying ethical behavior in the research setting leads to some surprising insights. Notably, we humans are remarkably similar in the way we construct our moral codes and remarkably inconsistent in how we apply them. Research in economics, social science, and biology tells us that our ethical behavior is complex, and our deepest motivations are not easily understood. Human history, though, provides ample evidence that learning more about what we believe and why can give us more control over our moral behavior, allowing us to become better more ethical people.

Learner Level: Beginner to Advanced

Learning Objectives

At the end of this course, participants will be able to:

• List the basic components of informed consent, and the rights to refuse treatment.
• Identify forms of physician-assisted suicide.
• Explore how the Wisconsin commitment standard has evolved along with national norms.
• Describe several ways that experimental scientists study morality.
• Explain the unconscious yet persuasive nature of making moral choices.
• List the five components of the moral mind.
• Analyze how individuals disengage from their ethical standards.