Welcome to the Nexus of Ethics, Psychology, Morality, Philosophy and Health Care

Welcome to the nexus of ethics, psychology, morality, technology, health care, and philosophy
Showing posts with label Professional Role. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Professional Role. Show all posts

Wednesday, July 1, 2020

Unusual Legal Case: Small Social Circles, Boundaries, and Harm

This legal case shows how much our social circles interrelate and how easily boundaries can be violated.  If you ever believe that you are safe from boundary violations in a current, complex culture, you may want to rethink this position.  A lesson for all in this legal case.  I will excerpt a fascinating portion of this case.

Roetzel and Andres
jdsupra.com
Originally posted 10 June 20

Possible Employer Vicarious Liability For Employee’s HIPAA Violation Even When Employee Engages In Unauthorized Act

Here is the excerpt:

When the plaintiff came in for her appointment, she handed the Parkview employee a filled-out patient information sheet. The employee then spent about one-minute inputting that information onto Parkview’s electronic health record. The employee recognized the plaintiff’s name as someone who had liked a photo of the employee’s husband on his Facebook account. Suspecting that the plaintiff might have had, or was then having, an affair with her husband, the employee sent some texts to her husband relating to the fact the plaintiff was a Parkview patient. Her texts included information from the patient chart that the employee had created from the patient’s information sheet, such as the patient’s name, her position as a dispatcher, and the underlying reasons for the plaintiff’s visit to the OB/Gyn. Even though such information was not included on the chart, the employee also texted that the plaintiff was HIV-positive and had had more than fifty sexual partners. While using the husband’s phone, the husband’s sister saw the texts. The sister then reported the texts to Parkview. Upon receipt of the sister’s report, Parkview initiated an investigation into the employee’s conduct and ultimately terminated the employee. As part of that investigation, Parkview notified the plaintiff of the disclosure of her protected health information.

The info is here.

Monday, February 19, 2018

Antecedents and Consequences of Medical Students’ Moral Decision Making during Professionalism Dilemmas

Lynn Monrouxe, Malissa Shaw, and Charlotte Rees
AMA Journal of Ethics. June 2017, Volume 19, Number 6: 568-577.

Abstract

Medical students often experience professionalism dilemmas (which differ from ethical dilemmas) wherein students sometimes witness and/or participate in patient safety, dignity, and consent lapses. When faced with such dilemmas, students make moral decisions. If students’ action (or inaction) runs counter to their perceived moral values—often due to organizational constraints or power hierarchies—they can suffer moral distress, burnout, or a desire to leave the profession. If moral transgressions are rationalized as being for the greater good, moral distress can decrease as dilemmas are experienced more frequently (habituation); if no learner benefit is seen, distress can increase with greater exposure to dilemmas (disturbance). We suggest how medical educators can support students’ understandings of ethical dilemmas and facilitate their habits of enacting professionalism: by modeling appropriate resistance behaviors.

Here is an excerpt:

Rather than being a straightforward matter of doing the right thing, medical students’ understandings of morally correct behavior differ from one individual to another. This is partly because moral judgments frequently concern decisions about behaviors that might entail some form of harm to another, and different individuals hold different perspectives about moral trade-offs (i.e., how to decide between two courses of action when the consequences of both have morally undesirable effects). It is partly because the majority of human behavior arises within a person-situation interaction. Indeed, moral “flexibility” suggests that though we are motivated to do the right thing, any moral principle can bring forth a variety of context-dependent moral judgments and decisions. Moral rules and principles are abstract ideas—rather than facts—and these ideas need to be operationalized and applied to specific situations. Each situation will have different affordances highlighting one facet or another of any given moral value. Thus, when faced with morally dubious situations—such as being asked to participate in lapses of patient consent by senior clinicians during workplace learning events—medical students’ subsequent actions (compliance or resistance) differ.

The article is here.

Monday, January 8, 2018

Advocacy group raises concerns about psychological evaluations on hundreds of defendants

Keith L. Alexander
The Washington Post
Originally published December 14, 2017

A District employee who has conducted mental evaluations on hundreds of criminal defendants as a forensic psychologist has been removed from that role after concerns surfaced about her educational qualifications, according to city officials.

Officials with the District’s Department of Health said Reston N. Bell was not qualified to conduct the assessments without the help or review of a supervisor. The city said it had mistakenly granted Bell, who was hired in 2016, a license to practice psychology, but this month the license was downgraded to “psychology associate.”

Although Bell has a master’s degree in psychology and a doctorate in education, she does not have a PhD in psychology, which led to the downgrade.

The article is here.

Tuesday, November 7, 2017

Inside a Secretive Group Where Women Are Branded

Barry Meier
The New York Times
Originally published October 17, 2017

Here are two excerpts:

Both Nxivm and Mr. Raniere, 57, have long attracted controversy. Former members have depicted him as a man who manipulated his adherents, had sex with them and urged women to follow near-starvation diets to achieve the type of physique he found appealing.

Now, as talk about the secret sisterhood and branding has circulated within Nxivm, scores of members are leaving. Interviews with a dozen of them portray a group spinning more deeply into disturbing practices. Many members said they feared that confessions about indiscretions would be used to blackmail them.

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In July, Ms. Edmondson filed a complaint with the New York State Department of Health against Danielle Roberts, a licensed osteopath and follower of Mr. Raniere, who performed the branding, according to Ms. Edmondson and another woman. In a letter, the agency said it would not look into Dr. Roberts because she was not acting as Ms. Edmondson’s doctor when the branding is said to have happened.

Separately, a state police investigator told Ms. Edmondson and two other women that officials would not pursue their criminal complaint against Nxivm because their actions had been consensual, a text message shows.

State medical regulators also declined to act on a complaint filed against another Nxivm-affilated physician, Brandon Porter. Dr. Porter, as part of an “experiment,” showed women graphically violent film clips while a brain-wave machine and video camera recorded their reactions, according to two women who took part.

The women said they were not warned that some of the clips were violent, including footage of four women being murdered and dismembered.

“Please look into this ASAP,” a former Nxivm member, Jennifer Kobelt, stated in her complaint. “This man needs to be stopped.”

In September, regulators told Ms. Kobelt they concluded that the allegations against Dr. Porter did not meet the agency’s definition of “medical misconduct,” their letter shows.

The article is here.

Sunday, October 22, 2017

A Car Crash And A Mistrial Cast Doubts On Court-Ordered Mental Health Exams

Steve Burger
Side Effect Media: Public Health/Personal Stories
Originally posted September 26, 2017

Here is an excerpt:

Investigating a lie

Fink was often hired by the courts in Indiana, and over the last ten years had performed dozens of these competency evaluations. His scene-of-the-crash confession called into question not only the Loving trial, but every one he ever worked on.

Courts rely on psychologists to assess the mental fitness of defendants, but Fink’s story raises serious questions about how courts determine mental competency in Indiana and what system of oversight is in place to ensure defendants get a valid examination.

The judge declared a mistrial in Caleb Loving’s case, but Fink’s confession prompted a massive months-long investigation in Vanderburgh County.

Hermann led the investigation, working to untangle a mess of nearly 70 cases for which Fink performed exams or testing, determined to discover the extent of the damage he had done.

“A lot of different agencies participated in that investigation,” Herman said. “It was a troubling case, in that someone who was literally hired by the court to come in and testify about something … [was] lying.”

The county auditor’s office provided payment histories of psychologists hired by the courts, and the Evansville Police Department spent hundreds of hours looking through records. The courts helped Hermann get access to the cases that Albert Fink had worked on.

Saturday, August 19, 2017

CIA Psychologists Settle Torture Case Acknowledging Abuses

Peter Blumberg and Pamela Maclean
Bloomberg News
Originally published August 17, 2017

Two U.S. psychologists who helped design an overseas CIA interrogation program agreed to settle claims they were responsible for the torture of terrorism suspects, according to the American Civil Liberties Union, which brought the case.

The ACLU called the accord “historic” because it’s the first CIA-linked torture case of its kind that wasn’t dismissed, but said in a statement the terms of the settlement are confidential.

The case, which was set for a U.S. trial starting Sept. 5, focused on alleged abuses in the aftermath of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks at secret “black-site” facilities that operated under President George W. Bush. The lawsuit followed the 2014 release of a congressional report on Central Intelligence Agency interrogation techniques.

The claims against the psychologists, who worked as government contractors, were filed on behalf of two suspected enemy combatants who were later released and a third who died in custody as a result of hypothermia during his captivity. All three men were interrogated at a site in Afghanistan, according to the ACLU.

ACLU lawyer Dror Ladin has said the case was a novel attempt to use the 1789 Alien Tort Claims Act to fix blame on U.S. citizens for human-rights violations committed abroad, unlike previous cases brought against foreigners.

The article is here.

Friday, July 21, 2017

Enabling torture: APA, clinical psychology training and the failure to disobey.

Alice LoCicero, Robert P. Marlin, David Jull-Patterson, Nancy M. Sweeney, Brandon Lee Gray, & J. Wesley Boyd
Peace and Conflict: Journal of Peace Psychology, Vol 22(4), Nov 2016, 345-355.

Abstract

The American Psychological Association (APA) has historically had close ties with the U.S. Department of Defense (DOD). Recent revelations describe problematic outcomes of those ties, as some in the APA colluded with the DOD to allow psychologists to participate, with expectation of impunity, in harsh interrogations that amounted to torture of Guantanamo detainees, during the Bush era. We now know that leaders in the APA purposely misled psychologists about the establishment of policies on psychologists’ roles in interrogations. Still, the authors wondered why, when the resulting policies reflected a clear contradiction of the fundamental duty to do no harm, few psychologists, in or out of the military, protested the policies articulated in 2005 by the committee on Psychological Ethics and National Security (PENS). Previous research suggested that U.S. graduate students in clinical psychology receive little or no training in the duties of psychologists in military settings or in the ethical guidance offered by international treaties. Thus psychologists might not have been well prepared to critique the PENS policies or to refuse to participate in interrogations. To further explore this issue, the authors surveyed Directors of Clinical Training of doctoral programs in clinical psychology, asking how extensively their programs address dilemmas psychologists may face in military settings. The results indicate that most graduate programs offer little attention to dilemmas of unethical orders, violations of international conventions, or excessively harsh interrogations. These findings, combined with earlier studies, suggest that military psychologists may have been unprepared to address ethical dilemmas, whereas psychologists outside the military may have been unprepared to critique the APA’s collusion with the DOD. The authors suggest ways to address this apparent gap in ethics education for psychology graduate students, interns, and fellows.

The article is here.

Thursday, July 6, 2017

The Torturers Speak

The Editorial Board
The New York Times
Originally posted June 23, 2017

It’s hard to watch the videotaped depositions of the two former military psychologists who, working as independent contractors, designed, oversaw and helped carry out the “enhanced interrogation” of detainees held at C.I.A. black sites in the months after the Sept. 11 terror attacks.

The men, Bruce Jessen and James Mitchell, strike a professional pose. Dressed in suits and ties, speaking matter-of-factly, they describe the barbaric acts they and others inflicted on the captives, who were swept up indiscriminately and then waterboarded, slammed into walls, locked in coffins and more — all in the hunt for intelligence that few, if any, of them possessed.

One died of apparent hypothermia.

Many others were ultimately released without charge.

When pushed to confront the horror and uselessness of what they had done, the psychologists fell back on one of the oldest justifications of wartime. “We were soldiers doing what we were instructed to do,” Dr. Jessen said.

Perhaps, but they were also soldiers whose contracting business was paid more than $81 million.

The information is here.

Tuesday, July 4, 2017

Psychologists Open a Window on Brutal C.I.A. Interrogations A Lawsuit Filed on Behalf of Former Prisoners Reveals New Details

Sheri Fink & James Risen
The New York Times
Originally posted June 21, 2017

Fifteen years after he helped devise the brutal interrogation techniques used on terrorism suspects in secret C.I.A. prisons, John Bruce Jessen, a former military psychologist, expressed ambivalence about the program.

He described himself and a fellow military psychologist, James Mitchell, as reluctant participants in using the techniques, some of which are widely viewed as torture, but also justified the practices as effective in getting resistant detainees to cooperate.

“I think any normal, conscionable man would have to consider carefully doing something like this,” Dr. Jessen said in a newly disclosed deposition. “I deliberated with great, soulful torment about this, and obviously I concluded that it could be done safely or I wouldn’t have done it.”

The two psychologists — whom C.I.A. officials have called architects of the interrogation program, a designation they dispute — are defendants in the only lawsuit that may hold participants accountable for causing harm.

The program has been well documented, but under deposition, with a camera focused on their faces, Drs. Jessen and Mitchell provided new details about the interrogation effort, their roles in it and their rationales. Their accounts were sometimes at odds with their own correspondence at the time, as well as previous portrayals of them by officials and other interrogators as eager participants in the program.

The article is here.

Wednesday, March 22, 2017

The Case of Dr. Oz: Ethics, Evidence, and Does Professional Self-Regulation Work?

Jon C. Tilburt, Megan Allyse, and Frederic W. Hafferty
AMA Journal of Ethics. February 2017, Volume 19, Number 2: 199-206.

Abstract

Dr. Mehmet Oz is widely known not just as a successful media personality donning the title “America’s Doctor®,” but, we suggest, also as a physician visibly out of step with his profession. A recent, unsuccessful attempt to censure Dr. Oz raises the issue of whether the medical profession can effectively self-regulate at all. It also raises concern that the medical profession’s self-regulation might be selectively activated, perhaps only when the subject of professional censure has achieved a level of public visibility. We argue here that the medical profession must look at itself with a healthy dose of self-doubt about whether it has sufficient knowledge of or handle on the less visible Dr. “Ozes” quietly operating under the profession’s presumptive endorsement.

The article is here.

Friday, November 27, 2015

Neuroscience: Tortured reasoning

Lasana T. Harris
Nature 527, 35–36 (05 November 2015) doi:10.1038/527035a
Published online 04 November 2015

In 2009, following the abuse of prisoners at its Guantanamo Bay detention camp, the US government made a significant decision. It moved the responsibility for 'enhanced interrogation techniques' from the CIA to a new government organization: the High-Value Detainee Interrogation Group (HIG). The move upset many CIA insiders; torture had been in their toolkit since the early days of the cold war. The remarks of one official at a HIG-organized conference on torture in Washington DC can be summed up as: how could a new agency, created to both conduct and study torture, replace the decades of practice and perfection attained by the CIA? By adding a scientific component, responded the newly appointed head of the HIG.

This exchange highlights the theme of neuroscientist Shane O'Mara's Why Torture Doesn't Work. Rightly, O'Mara takes a moral stand against torture (forced retrieval of information from the memories of the unwilling). However, instead of simply providing utilitarian arguments, he argues that there is no evidence from psychology or neuroscience for many of the specious justifications of torture as an information-gathering tool. Providing an abundance of gruesome detail, O'Mara marshals vast, useful information about the effects of such practices on the brain and the body.

(Underline provided by me.)

The entire book review is here.

Saturday, August 22, 2015

A Quantitative Analysis of Undisclosed Conflicts of Interest in Pharmacology Textbooks

Piper BJ, Telku HM, Lambert DA (2015) A Quantitative Analysis of Undisclosed Conflicts of Interest in Pharmacology Textbooks. PLoS ONE 10(7): e0133261. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0133261

Abstract

Background

Disclosure of potential conflicts of interest (CoI) is a standard practice for many biomedical journals but not for educational materials. The goal of this investigation was to determine whether the authors of pharmacology textbooks have undisclosed financial CoIs and to identify author characteristics associated with CoIs.

Methods and Findings

The presence of potential CoIs was evaluated by submitting author names (N = 403; 36.3% female) to a patent database (Google Scholar) as well as a database that reports on the compensation ($USD) received from 15 pharmaceutical companies (ProPublica’s Dollars for Docs). All publications (N = 410) of the ten highest compensated authors from 2009 to 2013 and indexed in Pubmed were also examined for disclosure of additional companies that the authors received research support, consulted, or served on speaker’s bureaus. A total of 134 patents had been awarded (Maximum = 18/author) to textbook authors. Relative to DiPiro’s Pharmacotherapy: A Pathophysiologic Approach, contributors to Goodman and Gilman’s Pharmacological Basis of Therapeutics and Katzung’s Basic and Clinical Pharmacology were more frequently patent holders (OR = 6.45, P < .0005). Female authors were less likely than males to have > 1 patent (OR = 0.15, P < .0005). A total of $2,411,080 USD (28.3% for speaking, 27.0% for consulting, and 23.9% for research), was received by 53 authors (Range = $299 to $310,000/author). Highly compensated authors were from multiple fields including oncology, psychiatry, neurology, and urology. The maximum number of additional companies, not currently indexed in the Dollars for Docs database, for which an author had potential CoIs was 73.

Conclusions

Financial CoIs are common among the authors of pharmacology and pharmacotherapy textbooks. Full transparency of potential CoIs, particularly patents, should become standard procedure for future editions of educational materials in pharmacology.

The entire article is here.

Friday, August 21, 2015

How medical students learn ethics: an online log of their learning experiences

Carolyn Johnston & Jonathan Mok
J Med Ethics doi:10.1136/medethics-2015-102716

Abstract

Medical students experience ethics learning in a wide variety of formats, delivered not just through the taught curriculum. An audit of ethics learning was carried out at a medical school through a secure website over one academic year to determine the quantity and range of medical ethics learning in the undergraduate curriculum and compare this with topics for teaching described by the Institute of Medical Ethics (IME) (2010) and the General Medical Council's (GMC) Tomorrow's Doctors (2009). The online audit captured the participants’ reflections on their learning experiences and the impact on their future practice. Results illustrate the opportunistic nature of ethics learning, especially in the clinical years, and highlight the reality of the hidden curriculum for medical students. Overall, the ethics learning was a helpful and positive experience for the participants and fulfils the GMC and IME curriculum requirements.

The entire article is here.

How do Medical Students Learn Ethics?

Guest Post by Carolyn Johnston
BMJ Blogs
Originally posted on August 3, 2015

How interested are medical students in learning ethics and law? I have met students who have a genuine interest in the issues, who are engaged in teaching sessions and may go on to intercalate in ethics and law. On the other hand some consider that ethics is “just common sense”. They want to know only the legal parameters within which they will go on to practice and do not want to be troubled with a discussion of ethical issues for which there may not be a “correct” answer.

Ethics and law is a core part of the undergraduate medical curriculum and so in order to engage students successfully I need to know whether my teaching materials are relevant, useful and interesting. In 2010 I ran a student selected component in which MBBS Year 2 students created materials for medical ethics and law topics for pre-clinical students which they considered were engaging and relevant, so that students might go further than learning merely to pass exams. One student, Marcus Sorensen, who had managed a design consultancy focusing on web design and development before starting his medical studies, came up with the idea of a website as a platform for ethics materials for King’s students and he created the website http://get-ethical.co.uk.

The entire article is here.

Thursday, August 13, 2015

Meeting the Challenge of Change

By Ken Pope
Excerpted from Ethics in Psychotherapy and Counseling: A Practical Guide, 5th Ed. 
Forthcoming January 2016.

Here is an excerpt:

When complicity with torture, violations of human rights, misleading the public, and other vital matters are at stake, organizations must address not only personnel, policies, and procedures but also the powerful incentives from inside and outside the organization, sources of institutional resistance to change, conflicting ethical and political values within the organization, and issues of institutional character and culture that allowed the problems to flourish for years, protected by APA's denials.

Organizations facing ethical scandals often publicly commit to admirable values such as accountability, transparency, openness to criticism, strict enforcement of ethical standards, and so on. These institutional commitments so often meet the same fate as our own individual promises to a program of personal change. We make a firm New Year's resolution to lead a healthier life. We pour time, energy, and sometimes money into making sure the change happens. We buy jogging shoes and a cookbook of healthy meals. We take out a gym membership. We discuss endlessly what approaches yield the best results. We commit to eating only healthy foods and to getting up five days a week at 5 a.m. for an hour of stretching, aerobics, and resistance exercises. But one, two, and three months later, the commitment to change that had taken such fierce hold of us and promised such wanted, needed, and carefully planned improvement has loosened or lost its grip.

The entire article is here.

Wednesday, August 12, 2015

Thoughts on Psychologists, Ethics, and the Use of Torture in Interrogations

Zimbardo, P.G. (2007). Thoughts on Psychologists, Ethics, and the Use of Torture in  Interrogations: Don’t Ignore Varying Roles and Complexities.
Analyses of Social Issues and Public Policy (ASAP) Online SSPSI Journal. Vol. 7, pp. 65-73.

Here is an excerpt:

Such considerations lead me to conclude that PENS has utilized the wrong model for its ethical deliberations about psychologists as consultants to military interrogations. The model featured in this task force report is that of a psychologist working for the military as an independent contractor, making rational moral decisions within a transparent setting, with full power to confront, challenge and expose unethical practices. It is left up to that individual to be alert, informed, perceptive, wise, and ready to act on principle when ethical dilemmas arise.

Instead, I will argue that those psychologists are "hired hands" working at the discretion of their military or government agency clients for as long as they provide valued service, which in the current war on terrorism is to assist by providing whatever information and advice is requested to gain "actionable intelligence" from those interrogated. PENS notes that psychologists often are part of a group of professionals, rarely acting alone. They can become part of an operational team, experiencing normative pressures to conform to the emerging standards of that group. They cannot make readily informed ethical decisions because they do not have full knowledge of how their personal contributions are being used in secret or classified missions. Their judgments and decisions may be made under conditions of uncertainty, and may include high stress. Moreover, definitions of basic terms are not constant, but shifting, so it becomes difficult or impossible to make a fully informed ethical judgment about any specific aspect of one's functions.

In addition, PENS does not recognize the reality that in field settings, the work of Ph.D./Psy.D. psychologists is often substituted by, or made operational by, numerous paraprofessionals, such as mental health counselors, personnel officers, psychological assistants and interns, and others trained in psychology. If they do not belong to professional associations, such as APA, they are relieved of the professional consequences of engaging in unethical actions. Thus, our concerns must extend to these psychologist paraprofessionals as well as those professionals within APA.

The entire article is here.

Sunday, August 9, 2015

What, exactly, does yesterday’s APA resolution prohibit?

By Marty Lederman
Just Security
Originally posted August 8, 2015

By an overwhelming vote of 156-1 (with seven abstentions and one recusal)–so lopsided that it stunned even its proponents–the American Psychological Association’s Council of Representatives yesterday approved a resolution that the APA describes as “prohibit[ing] psychologists from participating in national security interrogations.”

What does Approved Resolution No. 23B do, exactly?  As I read it, it does three principal things, in ascending order of importance:

1.  It reaffirms an existing APA ethical prohibition that psychologists “may not engage directly or indirectly in any act of torture or cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment or punishment,” a prohibition that “applies to all persons (including foreign detainees) wherever they may be held”; and it “clarifies” that “cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment or punishment” (CIDTP) should be understood not (or not only) as that term is defined in the U.S. Senate’s understandings of, and reservations to, the Convention Against Torture, but instead in accord with the broadest understanding of CIDTP adopted by any international legal body at the relevant time:  the definition “continues to evolve with international legal understandings of this term.”

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3.  Finally, and most significantly, the Resolution establishes a new prohibition that “psychologists shall not conduct, supervise, be in the presence of, or otherwise assist any national security interrogations for any military or intelligence entities, including private contractors working on their behalf, nor advise on conditions of confinement insofar as these might facilitate such an interrogation.”

The entire article is here.

Friday, August 7, 2015

Psychologists Approve Ban on Role in National Security Interrogations

By James Risen
The New York Times
Originally posted August 7, 2015

The American Psychological Association on Friday overwhelmingly approved a new ban on any involvement by psychologists in national security interrogations conducted by the United States government, even noncoercive interrogations now conducted by the Obama administration.

The council of representatives of the organization, the nation’s largest professional association of psychologists, voted to impose the ban at its annual meeting here.

The vote followed an emotional debate in which several members said the ban was needed to restore the organization’s reputation in the wake of a scathing independent investigation ordered by the A.P.A.’s board.

The entire article is here.

Friday, March 13, 2015

#BlackLivesMatter — A Challenge to the Medical and Public Health Communities

By Mary T. Bassett
The New England Journal of Medicine
Originally posted February 18, 2015

Here is an excerpt:

As New York City's health commissioner, I feel a strong moral and professional obligation to encourage critical dialogue and action on issues of racism and health. Ongoing exclusion of and discrimination against people of African descent throughout their life course, along with the legacy of bad past policies, continue to shape patterns of disease distribution and mortality. There is great injustice in the daily violence experienced by young black men. But the tragedy of lives cut short is not accounted for entirely, or even mostly, by violence. In New York City, the rate of premature death is 50% higher among black men than among white men, according to my department's vital statistics data, and this gap reflects dramatic disparities in many health outcomes, including cardiovascular disease, cancer, and HIV. These common medical conditions take lives slowly and quietly — but just as unfairly. True, the black–white gap in life expectancy has been decreasing, and the gap is smaller among women than among men. But black women in New York City are still more than 10 times as likely as white women to die in childbirth, according to our 2012 data.

The entire article is here.

Saturday, September 20, 2014

When Mental Health Professionals are on Facebook

By Steven Petrow
The Washington Post
Originally posted on August 25, 2014

For the past two weeks, whenever I’ve scrolled through my Facebook newsfeed I’ve come to the section “People You May Know.” The suggestions offered have included relatives, co-workers, some people I don’t even like in “real” life — and my current psychologist. “OMG!” I’ve winced repeatedly at the profile photo of my shrink, who for the sake of his privacy I’ll just call Dr. E.

Still, being the curious sort, I clicked to view his page, which isn’t very well protected from eyes like mine. For starters, there are 12 photos of him available for all the world to enjoy, several of them shirtless and one that had a “friend” of his posting “Woof!” underneath it. I also discovered pictures of Dr. E from high school with two nice-looking young ladies. Although I’ve known he was gay, I started to wonder: Was he bisexual then? When did he come out? I found myself thinking much more about his personal life than any patient should.

Among Dr. E’s Facebook friends was another psychologist, one who seemed to deploy no privacy safeguards whatsoever. Any patient clicking on his Facebook page could see tons of photos, including those of his wedding and honeymoon, and even his attendance at a celebration of “Bush 43’s” last night in office. (That makes it a good bet he’s a Dem, which might be TMI for a GOP patient.)

The entire article is here.