Welcome to Ethics Uncoded: A Clinician’s Space for Ethics You Can Actually Use (and Won’t Put You to Sleep).

Introducing my new project: Ethics Uncoded. A clinician‑centered home that turns messy, real‑world ethical questions into practical, usable guidance for therapists and other health professionals. Providing useful, honest ethics education that makes room for the messiness of practice, the realities of our systems, and where ethics itself goes wrong.

You may be:

• A licensed therapist (like me) or another type of clinician, working in healthcare, mental health, or somewhere in-between.

• One of the many I speak to who are terrified of “the board,” not because you’re bad or unethical, but because you’re confused about how it works.

• A fellow clinician of any kind watching AI and tech creep into your work and wondering if any of this is safe or okay.

• Or maybe you’re an overthinker with a vigilance about what feels fair, kind, or deeply wrong.

If that’s you: hi. You’re my people. Welcome.

Before I go further, two quick clarifications.

• First, when I talk about the “cost” of clinical work, I’m talking about the strain of practicing inside systems that are under‑resourced, inequitable, or badly designed. NOT about clients being too much or a burden.

• Second, Ethics Uncoded is an education project. I don’t use identifiable client stories here, and if I ever decide to share a de‑identified vignette for teaching, I will only do so with explicit permission and great care.

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Who I am (and why I’m like this):

I’m Tahlia Harrison, a licensed marriage and family therapist, Master of Arts in bioethics and science policy (nerd), educator, and doctoral researcher who has been thinking about ethics for a long time.

As a kid, I was overly cautious and told everyone when they were being mean, I’m sure I was annoying. I also came from a multicultural and multiracial family of creatives and public‑facing people who take craft seriously and care about impact. This combination of art + accountability basically wired my brain to ask, “What are we doing?” and “Who is this for?” about almost everything.

Now you’ll find me in my therapy office, research lab, conferences, and other public spaces, having conversations about how we keep clinical and research practices safe from everyday clinical practice, to more experimental treatments like psychedelic-assisted therapy, or other new and unknown territory like AI and digital mental health.

Over time, my questions have turned into: Is this practice or treatment sincerely helping, or is it mostly helping a billing metric? Whose comfort is this policy protecting, and whose safety is it costing? Who gets to decide what “ethical” looks like, and what (or who) is missing from that decision?

So yes, I am an ethics nerd. But if you regularly think about what’s good, fair, or right in your work and relationships, you might be one too.

Most therapists and clinicians I know already have a deep, sometimes anxious, ethical sense. They just don’t call it that. That little jolt when you realize a policy doesn’t quite sit right in your body? Ethics. The way you feel unsettled after a “perfectly legal” decision? Ethics. The voice telling you, “I know this is what I’m supposed to do, but it feels off”? Ethics.

We are all walking around with internal ideas about what is good and bad, allowed and not okay. We just rarely get time or language to unpack where those ideas came from, who taught them to us, whose voices were left out, and what might need to evolve.

I’m starting Ethics Uncoded to create a space for this unpacking, (and a few other reasons):

1. A lot (not all) of mainstream clinical Ethics content stays at the surface level. It tells us what to do without helping us understand why. People are using words like ethical and unethical as if they are obvious, neutral, and self‑evident. I rarely see naming of underlying values or philosophical commitments behind the labels. Very few posts or trainings explain why something is considered ethical or unethical, or what value is being protected. Even fewer explore how the recommendation changes when you add complexity: culture, structural racism, disability, queer and trans identities, poverty, tech, family systems, institutions, and real‑world constraints. Historical context is often missing, lacking acknowledgment that ethics codes were written by particular people, at a specific point in time, with specific blind spots. The result usually leaves clinicians carrying the weight of “ethical practice,” without acknowledging the systems, policies, and technologies influencing practice.

Ethical vs. unethical without explanation is not ethics; it’s just vibes, and I believe we can do better. If we’re going to throw around words like “ethical,” we owe it to ourselves and each other to understand what we mean, how we got there, and who gets left out when we don’t.

2. Many therapists are silently terrified. I know so many therapists and other clinicians who live with a low‑grade, constant anxiety about ethics. I hear a lot of fear of unintentionally breaking a rule and losing their license, confusion about whether something is an ethics issue or a legal issue (or both, or neither), and a sense that the rules were written for very different contexts than the ones they’re working in now.

Most of us got a handful of grad school lectures, a laminated code, and maybe a dry CE course every few years, and then got dropped into situations involving complex trauma, institutional pressure, digital tools, and systemic injustice. Add on cancel culture and social media and it is unsurprising that clinicians feel like they’re one mistake away from disaster.

3. Our frameworks are often too narrow for the reality of the work we’re doing day-to-day. Traditional bioethics and professional codes are not useless, but they are often incomplete as a guide for real world cases. They tend to focus on individual decision-making, abstract principles, and tidy scenarios: two people in a room, a clear consent process, no mention of racism, colonization, economics, disability, or algorithmic systems. Real life is not tidy.

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What I’ll be talking about through this project:

This space is for people who want ethics that are deep, honest, and actually usable in real sessions, team meetings, and chart notes, not just in abstract debates. Meaning, this will be a resource that: acknowledges power, history, and systems; treats lived experience as data; understands that “ethical” can still feel terrible and doesn’t pretend everything can be solved by better individual choices alone.

Ethics Uncoded will live in a few places: long‑form writing here on the blog, video content and podcast hosted on the YouTube channel, and social media (Instagram and TikTok) for shorter, more conversational pieces and ongoing conversations. Everyone takes in information differently, hopefully one of these platforms offers a version that works for your brain and your schedule.

Because confidentiality is non‑negotiable, you WILL NOT see identifiable client stories used as content. When I talk about cases, they’ll be public examples before even considering composites, or situations shared with explicit permission and great care. No thinly veiled versions of someone I’m currently working with. There will be future post about the why, forthcoming.

You WILL see posts about things like:

• Clinical ethics in real life. Boundary questions, documentation dilemmas, dual relationships in small communities.

• Moral injury, are my forced actions out of alignment with my principles… ‘is this exploitation or am I just tired.’

• Ethics and technology. AI notetaking, EHR features, digital mental health tools, privacy, surveillance capitalism, “HIPAA‑compliant” marketing, and how to think about tools you didn’t ask for but are suddenly expected to use.

• Codes of ethics (and their limits). How clinical codes are structured, what values they’re built to protect, where they serve us well, and where they fall short when we bring in systemic lenses, cultural context, or emerging tech.

• Ethics vs. law vs. policy. How those three categories overlap, where they diverge, and why “legal” doesn’t automatically mean “ethical,” and vice versa.

• The stories we internalize. The narratives we absorbed in grad school and early practice (“you’ll lose your license if…”) and how those stories shape our clinical decisions, our fear, and our capacity to act.

• Alternative and expanded frameworks. Seeing beyond the big four (beneficence, non-maleficence, autonomy, justice) and integrating other intersectional models like care ethics, feminist ethics, disability justice, decolonial perspectives, and other ways of thinking that ask, “Whose experience is centered? Whose is missing? What are we assuming is normal?”

Some pieces will be more practical (“How do I think about using AI in my notes?”), some will be more reflective (“What are we really afraid of when we make decisions?”), and some will just be me, nerding out on ideas I wish someone had explained to me 10 years ago.

The part that matters most to me is how I want this space to feel. I want Ethics Uncoded to feel like a place where:

• Questions are welcome, even (especially) the ones you’re embarrassed to ask;

• you don’t have to pretend you understand everything your board or institution says;

• you can admit you’re scared of “doing it wrong” without being shamed;

• you can say, “this doesn’t feel right,” and we can explore why together.

There are no stupid questions here. If you’re curious about what something means, how a rule applies, or why everyone seems to be using a word a certain way, that’s exactly the kind of thing I want to talk and write about.

If I miss something, get something wrong, or fail to see a perspective that matters, I want you to tell me, with kindness and openness. Robust disagreement is welcome; online abuse is not.

Lastly, and most importantly, this cannot be just my voice

I am one person, with my own background, training, unconscious gaps, and limits. Even though I’m comfortable in the therapy room and the classroom, being this kind of public, on social media, being on camera, makes me deeply uncomfortable and I will probably make mistakes. I’m doing it anyway. Because as a therapist and an educator, I ask other people to do uncomfortable things in the name of growth every single day. It feels dishonest not push myself alongside them..

This is also why Ethics Uncoded is not meant to be the definitive voice on anything. I want this project to be collaborative:

• If there’s a topic you want covered, reach out and let me know.

• If there are people you follow who are doing beautiful, thoughtful ethics work, especially from communities and perspectives that have been historically ignored, I want to know about them and build this together.

• If you’re someone who’s been thinking deeply about these questions and you want to talk, I want to talk to you.

The goal here is not to create one correct ethics take. The goal is community, curiosity, and care.

If any of this resonates, reach out anytime. Bring your questions, your “is this just me?”, your “I’ve never said this out loud but…” Join me here on the blog, in the podcast and videos on YouTube, or in the clinician corners of Instagram and TikTok, wherever it feels easiest to stay in the conversation. You don’t have to have the right vocabulary. You don’t have to agree with me. You just have to be willing to think, feel, and stay in the conversation.
Let’s see if we can all be good, together, and on purpose.