Where Ethics and Culture Collide: Ethical Dilemmas in Grief Work Following the Easter Sunday Attacks in Sri Lanka

Abstract

The success of mental health care for individuals and affected communities is strongly connected to the service providers' adherence to ethical standards of the profession. These ethical standards aim to ensure the safety, well-being and the best possible quality of service to the service users. As trainees and novice counsellors, these aspects are discussed and learned in detail during counsellor training programmes and other courses in mental health care. Continued professional supervision is considered an essential element of providing mental health care within an ethical framework by almost all the counsellor and mental health-care professional bodies in the world. Yet, this is practiced by few practitioners in low- and middle-income countries due to the shortage of trained, accessible, experienced supervisors. In this chapter, we discuss the importance of continued supervision in a changing sociocultural context to help mental health practitioners to be alert and prompt to safeguard the clients and ensure the best possible care for them when cultural aspects and ethical standards of client care are in conflict as they some times are.