Ethical issues in mental health research: the case for community engagement.

Purpose Of Review: To describe community-engaged research (CEnR) and how it may improve the quality of a research study while addressing ethical concerns that communities may have with mental health and substance abuse research. This article includes a review of the literature as well as recommendations from an expert panel convened with funding from the US National Institute of Mental Health.

Recent Findings: CEnR represents a broad spectrum of practices, including representation on institutional ethics committees, attitude research with individuals from the study population, engaging community advisory boards, forming research partnerships with community organizations, and including community members as co-investigators.

Ethics in Psychiatric Research: A Review of 25 Years of NIH-funded Empirical Research Projects.

BACKGROUND: This paper reviews the past 25 years of empirical research funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) on matters of ethics in psychiatric research. METHODS: Using the NIH RePORTER and Medline databases, we identified 43 grants and 77 publications that involved the empirical study of a matter of ethics in research involving mental health service users. RESULTS: These articles provide original and useful information on important topics, most especially the capacity to consent and the voluntariness of consent.