Abstract
The purpose of this report is to present the inherent ethical issues experienced in conducting forensic psychiatry research in special institutions Zimbabwe. The inertia of the habitus of forensic psychiatry research ethics has consistently been acknowledged as a rather complex conundrum in literature. Zimbabwe is no exception. In Zimbabwe, the precarious double bind exposure of the objectified and disempowered forensic psychiatric patients creates a hysteretic research ethical terrain or platform for the researcher. The platform is such that the Ethical Review Board in medical research gives the researcher ethical approval to carry out a research study on forensic psychiatric patients. The reality on the field is that these potential participants (patients) are gagged by the environment in which they are being cared for. The environment is such that the researcher can only congregate with a forensic psychiatric patient for interview provided the researcher has violated all the provisions of the Belmont Report of 1979. This labyrinthine ethical excursion is a result of symbolic assertion of power and struggle for legitimating between the prison system, the judiciary and the medical system. This scenario then calls for collaboration as academia, practice, professional organizations and regulatory bodies to untangle this intricate ethical web.
Highlights
Little attention has been given to ethical dilemmas that are specific to forensic psychiatry in view of mainstream bioethics
This contributes to the obscurity of forensic psychiatry research and its attendant ethical issues
This could be the reason forensic psychiatric settings are located in maximum security prisons where they exist as bastard ‘orphans’ that neither the prison system nor the health system wants to claim as their heirs [4]
Summary
Little attention has been given to ethical dilemmas that are specific to forensic psychiatry in view of mainstream bioethics. The complexity of the issue is compounded by the fact that forensic psychiatric settings are viewed by society as places that should have custody of unlawful, untrustworthy people who are risk to others This could be the reason forensic psychiatric settings are located in maximum security prisons where they exist as bastard ‘orphans’ that neither the prison system nor the health system wants to claim as their heirs [4]. The report borrows from and uses the language from the conceptual canon of Pierre Bourdieu, a French philosopher [7] His concepts of dominance, field, capital, symbolic violence and symbolic suffering seem to speak directly to the ethical realities in forensic psychiatric research in Zimbabwe. The following is the background that highlights medical bioethics against which the ethical challenges in forensic psychiatry research are discussed (Figure 1)
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