Personhood across disciplines: Applications to ethical theory and mental health ethics

Abstract

Summary Personhood is a cross-disciplinary concept that can inform health work, mental health practice, mental health ethics codes, and human development. The predominant view across disciplines of personhood is that it is a category in ethics specifying fundamental human right that involves dignity, respect, and so on, while developing, for example, in relational parenting and in caring for the ill. The paper reviews recent approaches to personhood in philosophy, psychology, law, medicine, and anthropology, as well as the United Nations Convention of Rights of Persons with Disabilities. It integrates the views and consider their applications to mental health ethics. In particular, it understands personhood as a meta- or organizing principle of the core principles in mental health ethics codes. Specifically, the concept helps cohere five proposed ethical principles that can be used to revise mental health ethics codes (life preservation; caring beneficence/non-maleficence; relational integrity; respect for the dignity and rights of persons and peoples; and promoting and acting from justice in society). The developmental model that it helps cohere is a Neo-Maslovian one in which the five levels in hierarchical needs are seen to develop toward personhood. The paper concludes with an analysis of personhood in terms of ethical theory, showing that the cross-disciplinary understanding of ethics highlighted in the paper speaks to multiple ethical theoretical approaches.