Informed decision making is a process in the course of which a competent individual learns from a physician of the risks and benefits of a medical intervention and agrees to undergo the procedure (informed consent) or to decline it (informed refusal). Psychiatrists are often consulted to ascertain whether a patient is competent to engage in this process. This manifest request may conceal a problematic agenda— to entice the psychiatrist to obtain the consent on behalf of another clinician, sometimes from a patient who is only marginally competent. This approach reduces psychiatrists to the status of informed consent technicians. By placing the burden of ethical deliberation on the psychiatrist alone, it tends to exempt other physicians