Ethical Standards for a Post-COVID-19 World

Abstract

The cataclysmic events of 2020 created an urgent need for mental health counseling to help individuals, families, and communities deal with grief, loss, and trauma. The sheer magnitude of the challenges has highlighted the necessity for collective interventions, as the need for help far surpasses what can be met through traditional individual or family counseling. Clinical mental health counselors must be prepared to respond to the new challenges in creative, culturally responsive, and ethical ways. The authors discuss the limitations of the prevailing codes of ethics, which are grounded in principle ethics, and propose that virtue ethics and relational ethics perspectives can be incorporated into ethical reasoning to make the process more responsive to collective interventions. A case scenario is presented and analyzed to illustrate this broader and more inclusive approach to ethical decision-making in a situation that calls for a collective intervention.