Introduction to the Special Section on the Goldwater Rule.

The publication of this special section offers a chance to reflect on a topic of perennial interest in psychiatry: the ethics of commenting on public figures. Since at least the election of 1964, when publisher Ralph Ginzburg became concerned about Barry Goldwater’s psychological fitness, psychiatrists have debated the ethics of speaking out about the mental health of public figures. In that year Mr. Ginzburg commissioned a partisan “survey” of U.S. psychiatrists for his new magazine, Fact. Although many psychiatrists said that Mr. Goldwater was mentally ill, some called Mr. Ginzburg’s survey unethical. It was later proved that Mr. Ginzburg had shaped the results to support the conclusion he had already reached. The American Psychiatric Association (APA) quickly condemned the survey, but Mr. Ginzburg published it anyway. Mr. Goldwater consulted his friend William F. Buckley, who advised him that there was no point in bringing a libel suit (Ref. 4, p 390). Mr. Goldwater sued anyway, prevailing in district court and then in the Supreme Court. In 1969 he said how pleased he was that the APA had spoken out against “those members of the profession who did not act in a proper ethical way.” The APA addressed the matter formally in 1973, when its Board of Trustees adopted Section 7.3 of The Principles of Medical Ethics With Annotations Especially Applicable to Psychiatry: the so-called Goldwater Rule (hereafter Rule). Since 1973, there have been many articles on the Rule in the New York Times, Psychology Today, and other popular publications. Until recently, however, there have been remarkably few scholarly contributions on the ethics of the Rule.