The Four-Stage Ethical Decision-Making Model

Mental health professionals frequently face ethical dilemmas, and it is important that they become familiar with an appropriate ethical decision-making model before the need presents itself. Although there are models in use, most of them are not research-based. This article presents the author’s four-stage model developed over the last 20 years that has been implemented on ethics committees in mental health and in teaching courses on ethics. The model is innovative in that it adds two components whose content has been previously found in research to be significant in predicting clinicians’ ethical behavior, namely attitudes and morality. An illustrative example is presented.