ISEPP's purpose is to (1) provide a legal, ethical, and emotional haven for professionals, academicians, and consumers who uphold its principles; and (2) to serve as a public platform for facilitating a critical examination of and conversation about these principles.

ISEPP is not a social justice or consumer rights organization, per se, and it does not concern itself with the many forms of corporate and government misconduct outside the following principles:

• ISEPP uses sound scientific methodology and critical reasoning to address its purpose.

• ISEPP maintains that difficult emotions, thoughts, and behaviors not resulting from physiological disease processes reflect individualized meanings and choices to be understood, not symptoms of pathology or dysfunction to be treated.

• ISEPP asserts that physiological disease processes causing mental or behavioral symptoms are not “mental” illnesses; they are physiological illnesses and medical matters outside the primary focus of psychiatry and psychology.

• ISEPP supports the doctrine of informed consent, respect for individual dignity, and freedom of choice, regardless of the individual’s perceptions, beliefs, values, experiences, distress, actions, and consequences thereof.