The most recent issue of Narrative Inquiry in Bioethics, “Living with Mental Health Challenges: Stories of Recovery from Across the Globe,” revisits a topic discussed a decade ago. For many authors, the answer to the question, “How far have we come in mental health care?” may be: not far enough.

Dilemmas that clinicians face in the coronavirus pandemic–who gets the ventilator, the 80-year-old grandmother or the 20-year-old student?–are the bread and butter of mainstream bioethics. In medical school, my classmates and I memorized the four principles (beneficence, nonmaleficence, justice, and autonomy), which we were told would help us make hard clinical decisions in ethically ambiguous terrain. But Covid-19 shows that medical ethics means much more than what generally falls under bioethics. Medical ethics is deeply political, and to act ethically in medicine means engaging the larger context in which it operates.