CODE OF ETHICS

Code of Ethics

Code of Ethics

Introduction

The ethics codes of both the American Psychological Association (APA) (American Psychological Association, 2006) and the American Counseling Association (ACA) (American Counseling Association, 2005) provide a set of standards and code of conduct to guide the professional activities of their members, including the provision of counseling and psychological services. In both codes, the duty of counselors and therapists to protect and uphold their patients' right to privacy is fundamental, and both generally are interpreted as including the protection of contact confidentiality. Nevertheless, it is important that counselors and their patients understand the distinction between content and contact confidentiality, as most laws governing the confidentiality of counselor-patient communications do not protect contact confidentiality (Luepker, 2008).

Therapists' obligations to protect their patients' confidentiality derives from the patient's right to privacy, which itself derives from the more general, but central, ethical value of personal autonomy—a person's right to “self-determination.” In this case, it is the right to determine with whom personal information may be shared. Confidentiality in this sense can be understood as the counselors' duty or obligation to support patients' right to privacy by not repeating to or sharing with others information shared privately with them by their patients (Bersoff, 2007). What patients consider to be private must stay private, and it is the duty of therapists to assure that this is the case with respect to disclosures made by patients in counseling. If a patient's private information is to be shared with another, it should be shared by the patient—or at least with the consent or authorisation of the patient. In this regard, a patient's right to privacy and a patient's right to confidentiality in relation to communications shared in counseling are one and the same (Luepker, 2008).

Discussion

Because confidentiality and privacy are a patient's right, the patient may waive that right if he or she chooses. In making such a waiver, it must be demonstrated that such waiver is undertaken knowingly and voluntarily. That is, counselors may ethically and legally reveal a patient's confidences with the informed consent of the patient (American Counseling Association, 2005).

It is often suggested that the protection of another's privacy through the maintenance of confidentially is a way to build trust within the counseling relationship—trust necessary for patients to share productively and personally with their counselors and therapists. In this regard, it is not uncommon to find it argued that an assurance of confidentiality is indispensable for effective therapy (American Psychological Association, 2006). In keeping with this view, counselors and the counseling profession generally assume that an assurance of confidentiality is essential for effective therapy and that most patients would not feel safe discussing personal and intimate aspects of their lives with a counselor without such assurance. Even the courts have embraced this assumption, with the U.S. Supreme Court writing in Jaffee v. Redmond (1996), Effective psychotherapy depends upon an atmosphere of confidence and trust in which the patient is willing to make a frank and complete disclosure of facts, emotions, memories and ...