When patients are unable to express their wishes and do not have surrogates or advance directives, which and whose values should inform decision making for them? We discuss ethical complexities of caring for unrepresented patients.

Dr Laura Guidry-Grimes helps us consider whether and which decisions can be shared with people experiencing mental illnesses.

Ari Ne’eman joins Ethics Talk to discuss his article, When Disability is Defined by Behavior, Outcome Measures Should Not promote “Passing”.

Dr Jonathan Treem joins Ethics Talk to discuss his article, coauthored with Drs Joel Yager and Jennifer L. Gaudiani: “A Life-Affirming Palliative Care Model for Severe and Enduring Anorexia Nervosa.”

AMA Journal of Ethics theme editor Emily Johnson, a fourth-year medical student at the University of Colorado School of Medicine, interviewed Susan Mizner, JD, about some merits, drawbacks, and alternatives to guardianship.

Eva V. Regel joins Ethics Talk to discuss her article: “How Should Clinicians Help Homeless Trauma Survivors Make Irreversible Surgical Care Decisions?”

Critical skills required to weigh decisions with serious consequences, manipulate information rationally, and choose wisely are skills that are likely to be impaired by frontal lobe injury that results in personality change.

People with mental illness or a degenerative mental disease have special protections under the law when entering into contracts or other binding documents.

A review of a landmark case that determined why and under what circumstances antipsychotic medications can be administered to incarcerated patients with mental illness against their will.