Ethical Issues In Mental Health

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Mental health at any level is the process of providing aid both prevention and treatment of mental disorders. The job of a mental health counselor entails counseling, diagnosing, and providing tools to help people that are developing or already have mental health issues. Recently, the organizations of mental health have crossed over from in person counseling to the used of the internet to complete this process. A lot of issues have come up because of this process due to face that the use of the internet in mental health can cause issues and concerns when it comes to the patient’s confidentiality and many more. The different types of use of the internet range from emails, group chats and instant messaging; which in some cases can raises …show more content…
When dealing with the mental health and internet, some major concerns would be how the patient’s information are is protected? Is the information is correct that the clients are providing? Does the person have the proper training and are they reliable? These issues can and many very well violate the values and ethical principles within the Code of Ethics, mainly the importance of human relationships, integrity, and competence (NASW). First, the importance of the human relationship can be damaged by the use of the internet. However, one of the most important parts is to engage clients as individual in the helping and restoration process (NASW). This can be hard to do over the internet which is many ways is less personal and more offsetting than a normal face to face …show more content…
This could very well corrupt the mental health process. The skills or professional expertise of each mental health advisor could be loosely assessed due to the use of the internet treatment which would violate the value of competence in the code of ethics altogether. All in all the use of the internet in therapy has it pros and cons but moreover it can violate many values in the code of ethics, interfere with confidentiality of a client, and also corrupt the liability of the organization. Dealing with people with mental illness, it was found that television had the most popular resources for health information (Borzekowski, Leith, Medoff, Potts, Dixon, Balis, Himeloc, (2009). However, it is also believed that someone with serious mental illness may not receive proper care for their basis medical conditions versus someone without a serious mental illness because how they communicate with the medical