Respect for Persons in the Psychiatric Treatment of Children and Adolescents

Focusing the APA Ethics Code to Include Development: Applications to Abuse

Extant ethics codes in psychological work generally are not sufficiently developmentally oriented. Here, we examine the American Psychological Association ethics code for its developmental sensitivity, find it lacking in this regard, and make recommendations. Our approach was to place children and youth at the forefront in forming developmentally-targeted principles, meta-principles, values, and rights. To further this aim, we consulted the one ethics code in the field that is developmentally-attuned, the ethics code of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry. We used a revised set of ethical principles for psychological work and developed a set of meta-principles. The five APA ethics code principles are: (a) beneficence and nonmaleficence; (b) fidelity and responsibility; (c) integrity; (d) justice; and (e) respect for people's rights and dignity. The set of ethical principles taken from Young (Revising the American Psychological Association ethics code, Springer International Publishing, 2017) includes: (a) life preservation, (b) caring beneficence/nonmaleficence, (c) relational integrity, (d) respect for the dignity and rights of persons and peoples, and (e) promoting and acting from justice in society. The major meta-principles proposed here include: (a) functioning from responsibility, (b) promoting personhood, and (c) promoting participation. In addition, we added meta-principles for working from appropriate (d) theory and (e) meta-theory (Neo-Maslovian and a combined relationism-empiricism, respectively). Secondary meta-principles in the text refer to (a) systems, (b) the person as unique, (c) the vulnerabilities of people, (d) autonomy, and (e) morality.