Authenticity: An Ethical Core for Clinical Practice

The ethical codes for mental health professionals are guided by internationally recognized standards centered around core principles: respect for others, competence, integrity, and responsibility to society. Central to these standards is our integrity as a human being, a professional, and a member of society, based on principles of fairness, justice, and respect for difference. These codes also recognize the value of community service; ways in which our training demands a certain level of social responsibility. We are called upon to know our field well enough to make choices that have integrity, and to engage in ongoing trainings that support our own development within a changing world. And yet, countering these standards is the anxious insecurity that threatens to make us lose our minds rather than build them, and to turn to rules that, in the absence of our reflective capacity, can become dangerously mindless. We see this, for example, in the turn towards using diagnoses, not to organize our understanding, but as reified entities that demand specific treatments that may harm more than they help. In that turn, we lose touch with the most basic principle guiding our ethics: to do no harm. The price of objectifying persons rather than assisting them in enlarging their own subjective capacities is highlighted in this era of AI. In such an era, we need to locate our ethics within a foundation that does not betray us – or those we work with – by masquerading behind a veneer of ‘truth’ that has no authentic, ethical, human core. Using clinical illustrations, I discuss the values of authenticity and respect for difference as crucial grounding points for ethical clinical practice.