This presentation was last reviewed on January 21, 2026, and broadcast live online on December 1, 2023, from 12:00 PM – 3:15 PM ET.

Individuals with ASD and IDD experience high psychiatric and medical comorbidities and significant disparities in access to care, making them particularly vulnerable to ethical missteps such as diagnostic overshadowing, premature assumptions about capacity and treatment, and overuse of restrictive interventions. These challenges persist in part due to limited clinician training in applying medical ethics specifically to neurodevelopmental populations, as well as unexamined cognitive biases that influence decision-making under time pressure. This lecture addresses that gap by providing a practical framework grounded in the four principles of medical ethics, along with structured strategies for bias recognition, and least-restrictive care planning. Participants will leave with concrete tools to slow down clinical reasoning, reduce vulnerability, and deliver more equitable and ethically driven psychiatric care.

This presentation was originally reviewed on January 14, 2026, and live streamed online on January 14, 2026, from 12:00 pm – 1:00 pm ET.

This presentation was last reviewed on December 8, 2025, and broadcast live online on February 22, 2023, from 12:00 PM – 1:00 PM ET.

This presentation was last reviewed on November 7, 2025, and broadcast live online on June 2, 2023, from 1:00 PM- 2:30 PM ET.

Clinical ethics as a field was founded to helping clinicians at the day to day level at the bedside, wrestle with their ethical decisions in relating to the doctor patient relationship. A key concept in the virtue ethics framework is phronesis (Greek) or Practical Wisdom. Some have simply described Practical Wisdom (Greek: phronesis) as the “uber-virtue” in life—the goal-directed, integrative skill or disposition that helps one discern the “right way to do the right thing” (Barry Schwartz). Dr. Lauris Kaldjian has described practical wisdom in medicine to be analogous to that deliberative ability to make good clinical judgments at the bedside. Clinicians-in-training need practical wisdom because, as Kaldjian notes, medicine is a “moral practice of care that aims at health and healing and treats patients as persons,” and clinicians in training often find themselves learning to make wise, context-sensitive decisions in complex situations that are rife with uncertainty, challenged by competing perspectives, and constrained by various social forces in healthcare. This presentation aims to offer a clinician-friendly framework for analyzing and addressing challenging ethical or professional decisions in the care of the patient.

This presentation was last reviewed on July 19, 2024, and broadcast live online on September 30, 2022, from 1:00 PM – 4:15 PM ET. 

This presentation was originally reviewed on May 20, 2024, broadcast live online on May 22, 2024, from 12:00 pm – 1:00 pm ET.

This presentation was last reviewed on June 5, 2024, and broadcast live online on November 5, 2021 from 9:00 AM - 12:15 PM ET. 

This presentation was last reviewed on May 13, 2024, and broadcast live online on January 12, 2022, from 12:00 PM - 1:00 PM ET.