Carmen is supposed to see her small caseload of persistently mentally ill individuals at least twice a week. Lately, with school and her mother’s death, she has not really seen her clients that often. She has checked in with them on the phone, but she also has used time when she was out seeing clients to do errands at the library and to empty her mother’s home. Now one of her clients is in court after committing a crime. The client and the lawyer agree that the client might be able to use his mental health status as a reason for committing the crime, and they ask to introduce the case record as evidence in the court proceedings. Fearing that it will be discovered how little supervision and attention she has given her client, and knowing that ultimately she could be blamed for the fact that her client committed the crime while under her somewhat irresponsible care, Carmen invokes the concept of privileged communication to avoid having to give the file to the court.
The above hypothetical practice situations are designed to help you apply what you have learned in this chapter. For each situation, decide what was done in the situation that was unethical.
