Ricerc@Sapienza

Purpose: Italy has long lacked a law regulating patients' informed consent and advance directives (ADs). All previous attempts to introduce a law on this matter failed to reach positive outcomes, and aroused heated ideological debate over the exact meaning of life and death. We report on the new law on informed consent and ADs approved by the Italian Parliament on 14th December 2017. Materials and methods: We analyse the new law and discuss the main ethical points connected with it, in the Italian context and in comparison with the international situation.

Brain death in pregnancy (BDinP) has been described in literature as a “rare event” and “hopeless condition for
patients”, who has a devastating potential to negatively affect the poetry of the moment of welcoming a new human
life to the world. Clinical consequences of BDinP are extremely dangerous for the life of a foetus that, without prompt
medical actions, is doomed to suffer the same fate as the mother. Modern medical techniques make it possible to

Over the last years, case-law and doctrine have increasingly focused on informed consent to medical treatments. This sensibility derives from the newly achieved awareness about the implications of the right to health and of the true interests underlying informed consent. Another reason is the ever-increasing litigation on the adequacy and correctness of the preliminary information given for medical treatments.

Even more than for other treatments, great importance must be given to informed consent in the case of electroconvulsive therapy (ECT). In a percentage of cases, the symbolic connotation of the treatment, even if mostly and intrinsically negative, may actually be a determining factor in the patient's motives for giving consent.

In this paper I intend to focus on common alterations and distortions to an informed, voluntary, and decisionally-capacitated consent in the medical setting, especially those that impact the patient’s decision-making process. In doing so, I will focus on two specific issues. On the one hand, I will examine cognitive biases and self-deceptive processes that may affect the patient’s choice and autonomy. On the other hand, I will discuss the capacity of self-government as what usually referred to as the neurocognitive capacity of self-control.