decorating are the psychologist’s clinical judgment.
A clinical approach to fulfilling a psychologist’s legal and ethical responsibilities has not received sufficient attention in our literature or professional meetings. One reason for this professional oversight may be related to our discipline’s countertransference: Legal and ethical rules generate anxiety. Anxiety works against nuance and toward disjunctive thinking. Once a legal or ethical question is clarified by an attorney or ethics officer, a psychologist may view the matter as settled and act in the hope it will go away. A different approach is to view clarifying legal and ethical questions as the cue to begin considering the most clinically appropriate manner of proceeding. At this point in the process, a clinical consultation on how to move forward may be the most appropriate next step. An article or conference session titled “Best Clinical Approaches to Fulfilling Mandatory Duties to Report” would be a welcome contribution to this discussion.
Another example of integrating a clinical perspective comes from calls to the APA Ethics Office regarding meeting with a family after a client has died. Especially when the death may be a suicide, psychologists become focused — appropriately so — on risk-management considerations. A clinical approach is not in contrast to abiding by legal and ethical constraints regarding a psychologist’s continuing duty of confidentiality following a client’s death. Rather, a clinical approach asks how a psychologist can be helpful to grieving survivors in a manner that respects the legal and ethical bounds of the interactions. A shift from a reactive, defensive posture toward an approach that incorporates clinical sensitivity and insight into the experience of grief may be consistent with law and ethics and at the same time bring both relief to distressed individuals and considerable risk-management benefits for the psychologist.
Stephen Behnke, JD, PhD, MDiv, is the director of APA's Ethics Office.
Although the law may mandate that a psychologist take a particular course of action, the law rarely precludes the psychologist from fulfilling a legal mandate in a clinically appropriate manner and it is most often in the psychologist’s risk management interests to do so.