Читать книгу Ethics in Psychotherapy and Counseling - Kenneth S. Pope - Страница 25

When George, a 19 year-old college student, began psychotherapy with Dr. Hightower, he told the doctor that he was suffering from a fatal disease. Two months into therapy, George felt that he trusted his therapist enough to tell her that the disease was AIDS (acquired immune deficiency syndrome).

During the next 18 months, much of the therapy focused on George’s losing battle with his illness and his preparations for the end of life. After two stays in the hospital for pneumonia, George informed Dr. Hightower that he knew he would not survive his next hospitalization. He had done independent research and talked with his physicians, and he was certain that, if pneumonia developed again, it would be fatal due to numerous complications and that it would likely be a long and painful death. George said that when that time came, he wanted to die in the off-campus apartment he had lived in since he came to college—not in the hospital. He would, when he felt himself getting sicker, take some illicitly obtained drugs that would ease him into death. Dr. Hightower tried to dissuade him from this plan, but George refused to discuss it and said that if Dr. Hightower continued to bring up the subject, he would quit therapy. Convinced that George would quit therapy rather than discuss his plan, Dr. Hightower decided that the best course of action was to offer caring and support—rather than confrontation and argument—to a patient who seemed to have only a few months to live.

Four months later, Dr. Hightower was notified that George had taken his life. Within the next month, Dr. Hightower became the defendant in two civil suits. One suit, filed by George’s family, alleged that Dr. Hightower, aware that George was intending to take his own life, did not take reasonable and adequate steps to prevent the suicide, that she had not notified any third parties of the suicide plan, had not required George to get rid of the illicit drugs, and had not used hospitalization to prevent the suicide. The other suit was filed by a college student who had been George’s partner. The student alleged that Dr. Hightower, knowing that George had a partner and that he had a fatal sexually transmitted disease, had a duty to protect George’s partner. The partner alleged ignorance that George had been suffering from AIDS.