Abstract
Psychiatric patients often experience ambiguous and multiple wills. In the case discussed here, a female patient with delusions of persecution also had an ambiguous will. She strongly refused to be hospitalized, while at the same time having a certain degree of dependency on medical care. Evaluated from a traditional bioethical viewpoint, the judgment would be that she lacks autonomy and psychological capacity, justifying her involuntary hospitalization. In this case, however, the patient, her family, and the medical staff had a lengthy talk about her illness and hospitalization, expressing their own opinions and experiences. As a result of this process, the patient seemed partially or implicitly to accept her hospitalization. Thus, the decision-making process dictated by standard bioethical principles gave way to a clinical ethnographic process which promoted recognition and exchange on an experiential level, allowing the reconstruction and fluidity of the problem itself to be recognized.
