The New England Journal of Medicine has published a medical ethics paper examining the legal and regulatory framework around conducting research with patients who are held in hospital without their consent.
The paper, written by Benjamin C. Silverman, MD, Kate Gallin, JD, and Joan A. Camprodon, MD, PhD, MPH, appears in the journal’s Medicine and Society series. It focuses on involuntary hospitalisation (being admitted to a psychiatric unit under a legal order, without the patient choosing to go) and the particular ethical questions that arise when researchers want to include those patients in studies.
Involuntarily hospitalised patients occupy a complicated position in research ethics. They cannot simply walk out, which raises questions about whether any consent they give is truly free. Yet excluding them entirely from research can mean that treatments developed for psychiatric conditions are tested only on people whose circumstances look very different from those most severely affected.
The authors bring three distinct professional lenses to the question — clinical psychiatry, law, and public health — and the paper is tagged under both psychiatry and medical ethics, suggesting it addresses the overlap between clinical practice, patient rights, and study design.
On top of that, the New England Journal of Medicine is a peer-reviewed weekly medical journal published by the Massachusetts Medical Society and is one of the most widely read clinical journals in the world. Papers in its Medicine and Society series typically address the social, legal, and ethical dimensions of medical practice rather than reporting trial data.
The full paper is available through the journal’s website for those with access. Clinicians, researchers, and ethics committee members working in mental health settings may find it directly relevant to their practice.
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Source: @NEJM