Describe the limits of confidentiality
Assignment: Confidentiality Paper

Confidentiality
A counselor has been treating a client, Jay, who was recently in a bad accident that left him bedridden and partially paralyzed. With sustained physiotherapy and medication, the paralytic effect has gone, but motor movements are still affected.

Jay’s steady girlfriend left him when she could not cope with the demands of a paralytic partner. Jay lost his job too. These left a heavy dent on his self-esteem, and he was slowly letting his life slip past. He began attending therapy at the insistence of friends.

One day, he discloses to his counselor that he is contemplating suicide because there is nothing he looks forward to in life. He announces that he has had enough of living and plans to shoot himself that evening. The counselor knows he has access to an old hunting rifle and that he has attempted suicide in the past. He has been under treatment for major clinical depression for the past three months.

Discuss the ethical issues presented in this scenario; identify the ethical code number and definition.
Describe the limits of confidentiality that must be considered.
Justify whether or not the counselor would need to break confidentiality.
Describe the steps the counselor should follow if he or she finds it necessary to break confidentiality.
Compare the ethical issues presented in this scenario to the APA’s ethical standards and describe the similarities or differences in the ethical codes using the following website: http://www.apa.org/ethics/code/index.aspx.

Assignment: Confidentiality

Assignment: Confidentiality

You must proofread your paper. But do not strictly rely on your computer’s spell-checker and grammar-checker; failure to do so indicates a lack of effort on your part and you can expect your grade to suffer accordingly. Papers with numerous misspelled words and grammatical mistakes will be penalized. Read over your paper – in silence and then aloud – before handing it in and make corrections as necessary. Often it is advantageous to have a friend proofread your paper for obvious errors. Handwritten corrections are preferable to uncorrected mistakes.

Use a standard 10 to 12 point (10 to 12 characters per inch) typeface. Smaller or compressed type and papers with small margins or single-spacing are hard to read. It is better to let your essay run over the recommended number of pages than to try to compress it into fewer pages.

Likewise, large type, large margins, large indentations, triple-spacing, increased leading (space between lines), increased kerning (space between letters), and any other such attempts at “padding” to increase the length of a paper are unacceptable, wasteful of trees, and will not fool your professor.

The paper must be neatly formatted, double-spaced with a one-inch margin on the top, bottom, and sides of each page. When submitting hard copy, be sure to use white paper and print out using dark ink. If it is hard to read your essay, it will also be hard to follow your argument.