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.

Dr Ariane Lewis discusses how we can navigate uncertainty and ambiguity about brain death by understanding clinical criteria for brain death determination and how our approaches to death are culturally and socially situated.

Which distinctions between minimally conscious states and vegetative states should clinicians consider?

The diagnostic and clinical criteria for diagnosing persistent vegetative state.

Entrainment can distract from pain and offer a means of witnessing important health care experiences.

Elder self-neglect can be assessed with the Elder Self-Neglect Assessment (ESNA) and addressed by physicians’ partnering with patients to achieve common goals.

Researchers and clinicians face ethical and policy-based challenges in disclosing, preventing and treating psychosis. Which diagnostic labels should be considered to motivate more effective public and professional dialogue about psychosis risk?

A guardian’s request to sterilize a woman with intellectual disabilities is not ethically justifiable unless the woman assents and it is to her benefit.

Although the stigma of the psychosis risk label can cause harm, the label can also confer benefit and provides an explanatory framework for symptoms.

Noninvasive prenatal testing arguably constitutes a form of eugenics in a social context in which certain reproductive outcomes are not valued.