Psychiatry and related areas of mental health practice pose particular ethical challenges arising from the problematic nature of mental disorder as a concept.
It is only in psychiatry for example that involuntary treatment of a capacitous adult in their own interests may be ethically acceptable: the justification for this is essentially that, although capacitous, the person concerned is suffering from a mental disorder and as such is not behaving rationally; but this justification depends on a whole series of deeply problematic concepts – rationality, of course, together with embedded concepts, such as agency, intention, responsibility, personal identity, freedom and determinism, not to mention a whole series of issues around power relationships and the distinction between medical treatment and social control.