The Center for Ethical Practice, Inc.
Mary Alice Fisher, Ph.D., Executive Director

Mary Alice Fisher is founding director of The Center for Ethical Practice, Inc. and a clinical psychologist in private practice in Charlottesville, Virginia, where she provides psychotherapy for adult clients and ethics consultation for mental health professionals. Her previous clinical experience includes inpatient therapy with adults and adolescents, and clinical services to children, adolescents, and families in community mental health clinics.

She is a member of the adjunct faculty of the University of Virginia Curry Programs in Clinical and School Psychology, where she previously taught classes in ethical and professional issues, led treatment teams and seminars, and served as clinical supervisor to clinical psychology doctoral students. She currently provides training and consultation to students and faculty in that program.

For the past 20 years, she has conducted continuing education workshops and has offered consultation on ethical and legal issues for mental health service providers of all professions. For her work with Virginia clinicians, she was awarded Fellow status in the Virginia Academy of Clinical Psychologists, an academy of the Virginia Psychological Association.

She has specialized in confidentiality ethics, with a focus on the ethical complications of "conditional confidentiality," the only level of confidentiality that mental health clinicians are now legally free to offer. Her Ethical Practice Model for insuring the protection of clients' confidentiality rights was published as the lead article in the January 2008 issue of American Psychologist (Vol. 63, No. 1, pp. 1–13), "Protecting Confidentiality Rights: The Need for an Ethical Practice Model." At the August, 2009, American Psychological Association (APA) National Convention in Boston, she presented a continuing education workshop, "Can You Keep A Secret?" based on that article. [This website provides both an HTML version of that article (linked above) and an outline of the Confidentiality Practice Model on which it is based.]

Other recent articles include "Replacing 'Who Is The Client' With a Different Ethical Question" (Professional Psychology: Research and Practice, January 2009, Vol 40, No. 1, pp. 1-7) and "Ethics-Based Training for Non-Clinical Staff in Mental Health Settings" (Professional Psychology: Research and Practice, October 2009, Vol. 40, No. 5, pp. 459-466 ).

Dr. Fisher has just completed an invited chapter on the topic, "Confidentiality and Record Keeping," for the upcoming two-volume APA Ethics Handbook for Psychologists, with expected publication in 2011. Meanwhile, she is under contract with Oxford University Press to write a book about therapeutic confidentiality, tentatively entitled Can You Keep A Secret? Using An Ethical Practice Model to Protect Confidentiality Rights.

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Mary Alice Fisher, Ph.D.
Phone: 434-971-1841, Ext. 2
E-Mail: Fisher at Virginia dot edu

The Center for Ethical Practice, Inc.
934 East Jefferson Street, Charlottesville VA 22902

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