The ethics of conducting research with older psychiatric patients

The ethical context in which geropsychiatric research is carried out today in the United States has its origins in events of the 1960s and 1970s. Three main trends can be identified. The first is sociopolitical and involves the challenge to tradition and authority manifested in that period with its consequent moral pluralism and focus on new forms of individualism. Ethical thinkers redirected their attention to more normative questions and moral problems in medicine came under close scruitiny. Regulatory changes affecting research followed. The second trend greatly influenced the type of research that would predominate in psychiatry after the mid‐1970s. This trend involved the redirection of psychiatric thinking towards renewed interest in psychopathology, nosology and quantitation which was dormant during the preceding psychodynamically oriented decades. The final trend was the aging of the American population. Whereas before the 1960s there was little interest in aging the age‐related neuropsychiatric conditions, subsequent decades ushered in much interest and support for human aging research. New moral problems have naturally arisen. Most of them have involved vulnerable subpopulations of elderly. Nontheless, while small areas of disagreement remain and regulation is incomplete, research in geriatric psychiatry now proceeds within a well‐structured context of ethical guidelines and government regulations.