The recent laws on mental health define psychiatric illness as a loss of consciousness and understanding of consequences of self-behavioral acts, evaluated by loss of discernment. As discernment represents the main criteria of responsibility towards personal actions, this study attempts at presenting the ethical issues related to discernment evaluation from the perspective of forensic medicine. We propose a mint representation of the content and consequences of ones own actions as a new criteria of evaluation, taking into account the modern principles of psychology and psychiatry.
Keywords:- bioethics
- discernment
- psychiatric illness