MaleSurvivor Conference Examines Sexual Abuse in Sports

By Eric V. Copage
The New York Times
Originally published November 18, 2012

Here are some excerpts:

A dour procession of stories about sexual misconduct by coaches toward their male charges has come to light in recent months. Jerry Sandusky, a former assistant football coach at Penn State, was sentenced in October to 30 to 60 years in prison on 45 counts of child molesting. Sugar Ray Leonard wrote in his autobiography last year that he was sexually molested by an Olympic boxing coach. The N.H.L. players Theo Fleury and Sheldon Kennedy were sexually abused as teenagers by their hockey coach Graham James.
      

The prevalence of sexual abuse among all boys 17 and under has been variously estimated to be as low as 5 percent and as high as 16 percent. For some of the millions of children who participate in sports nationwide, and their parents, sexual assault in a sports context has its own dynamic.

      

“Sports is a place where parents send their boys to learn skills, to learn how to be teammates and how to work together — to make boys stronger and healthier,” said Dr. Howard Fradkin, author of “Joining Forces,” a book about how men can heal from sexual abuse. “It’s the place where we send our boys to grow up. The betrayal that occurs when abuse occurs in sports is damaging because it destroys the whole intent of what they started out to do.”

 

The entire story is here.

Maine West High School Sued For Student Hazing, Sodomy 'Sanctioned By Coaches'

The Huffington Post
Originally published November 20, 2012

The family of a Illinois high school freshman is suing the Maine Township High School District 207, claiming that Maine West High School officials sanctioned hazing of the unnamed teen as part of a years-long ritual at the school.

The unidentified mother appeared at a news conference Monday wearing a baseball cap and sunglasses alongside attorney Antonio Romanucci.

"I thought my son would be safe at school," she said, according to WLS-TV. "You think when you drop off your son, it's a safe place to be. But I feel like the coaches should have kept him safe on the soccer field, and they didn't do that."

The mother adds that the acts -- and the school's failure to respond -- breaks Illinois state anti-bullying laws.

The lawsuit claims that the 14-year-old and at least two other boys were sexually assaulted during soccer practice in September -- during school hours and condoned by coaches. The complaint alleges that teammates shoved the three boys to the ground and beat them. The older players then held them down, pulled down their pants and underwear and sodomized them.



The entire story is here.

The Role of Health Professionals in Detainee Interrogation

A teenager tortured at Guantanamo, and the stalled legislation to ensure clinicians "first, do no harm"

By Santiago Wills
The Atlantic
Originally published November 11, 2012

Here is one excerpt:

In the aftermath of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, ever since leaked reports and testimonies -- including that of alleged 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, currently on trial in Guantanamo -- were published in 2004, the issue has attracted the attention of the media, health organizations, and political activists. Psychologists and doctors have clashed with their peers and with the Department of Defense over the role that health professionals should play in interrogations, given their oath to "do no harm." The Senate Judiciary Committee and numerous military investigations have confirmed that physicians and clinicians played a significant role during so-called enhanced interrogations, either through reverse engineering of the Survival, Evasion, Resistance, Escape (SERE) program, or through monitoring and assisting in CIA black sites and prisons like Bagram and Guantanamo.

Recently, that conflict reached politicians in Albany, New York. This year, State Senator Thomas Duane and Assembly Member Richard Gottfried sponsored a unique piece of legislation that establishes sanctions (including license removal) for state-licensed health professionals who participate in torture or improper treatment of prisoners.

"The bill presents an opportunity to fill a gap in state law on the regulation of health professionals that desperately needs to be filled," Leonard Rubenstein, the former president of Physicians for Human Rights -- an independent organization that fights human rights violations all around the world -- said in a public forum. "Almost everyone agrees that the idea that health professionals can participate in abuse of detainees and prisoners is indefensible. If that is the case, it is also indefensible to exclude such acts from state law on licensing and regulation of health professionals."

The entire story is here.

Physician Suicide Linked to Work Stress

By Crystal Phend, Senior Staff Writer
MedPage Today
Originally published November 14, 2012

Suicide among physicians appears to follow a different profile than in the general population, with a greater role played by job stress and mental health problems, a national analysis showed.

Problems with work were three times more likely to have contributed to a physician's suicide than a nonphysician's, Katherine J. Gold, MD, MSW, of the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, and colleagues found.

Their analysis of the National Violent Death Reporting System also showed that known mental illness prior to suicide was 34% more common among physicians than nonphysicians.

"The results of this study paint a picture of the typical physician suicide victim that is substantially different from that of the nonphysician suicide victim in several important ways," the group wrote online in General Hospital Psychiatry.

The entire story is here.

The original article is here.

Here is the conclusion from the abstract:

Mental illness is an important comorbidity for physicians who complete a suicide but postmortem toxicology data shows low rates of medication treatment. Inadequate treatment and increased problems related to job stress may be potentially modifiable risk factors to reduce suicidal death among physicians.

L.A. Psych School Lied, Class Claims

By WILLIAM DOTINGA
Courthouse News Service
November 15, 2012


Students claim in a class action that the Los Angeles campus of the Chicago School of Professional Psychology recruited them by lying that it was accredited by the American Psychological Association.

Miranda Jo Truitt and three other named plaintiffs sued the Chicago School of Professional Psychology and its subsidiaries, including TCS Global, in Superior Court. They allege fraud, conspiracy, false advertising and consumer law violations.

Also named as defendants are the California Graduate Institute and the school's national president Michelle Nealon-Woods and "lead faculty" member of the Los Angeles campus, David Sitzer.

The students claim the Chicago School of Professional Psychology, or TCS, was "ostensibly formed, organized and operated exclusively for exempt purposes under section 501(c)(3) of the Internal Revenue Code for the 'advancement of education and science,' but in fact is being operated by its management team for the benefit of private interests for financial profit and personal gain through a network of interrelated companies and entities owned and controlled by TCS.

The entire story is here.

Thanks to Ken Pope for this story.

What Brand Is Your Therapist?

by Lori Gottlieb
The New York Times
Originally published November 23, 2012

Here is an excerpt:


What nobody taught me in grad school was that psychotherapy, a practice that had sustained itself for more than a century, is losing its customers. If this came as a shock to me, the American Psychological Association tried to send out warnings in a 2010 paper titled, “Where Has all the Psychotherapy Gone?” According to the author, 30 percent fewer patients received psychological interventions in 2008 than they did 11 years earlier; since the 1990s, managed care has increasingly limited visits and reimbursements for talk therapy but not for drug treatment; and in 2005 alone, pharmaceutical companies spent $4.2 billion on direct-to-consumer advertising and $7.2 billion on promotion to physicians, nearly twice what they spent on research and development.

According to the A.P.A., therapists had to start paying attention to what the marketplace demanded or we risked our livelihoods. It wasn’t long before I learned that an entirely new specialized industry had cropped up: branding consultants for therapists.

I couldn’t imagine hiring a branding consultant to lure people to the couch. Psychotherapy is perhaps one of the few commercial businesses that doesn’t see itself as one, that views financial gain as unseemly when connected to the delicate work of emotional insight. Moreover, the field is predicated on strict concepts of authenticity, privacy and therapist-patient boundaries. Branding was the antithesis of what we did.

The entire article is here.

When the Patient Is ‘Noncompliant’

By DANIELLE OFRI, M.D.
The New York Times
Originally published November 15, 2012

Here are some excerpts:

“Noncompliant” is doctor-shorthand for patients who don’t take their medications or follow medical recommendations. It’s one of those quasi-English-quasi-medical terms, loaded with implications and stereotypes.

As soon as a patient is described as noncompliant, it’s as though a black mark is branded on the chart. “This one’s trouble,” flashes into most doctors’ minds, even ones who don’t want to think that way about their patients. And like the child in school who is tagged early on as a troublemaker, the label can stick around forever.

(cut)

“Improving adherence is a team sport,” Dr. Steiner adds. Input from nurses, care managers, social workers and pharmacists is critical.

The entire article is here.

Move Over Economists: We Need a Council of Psychological Advisers

Much of governing involves predicting behavior or getting people to change it. Lawyers and economists need some help with both.

By Barry Schwartz
The Atlantic
Originally published

Though President Obama won reelection decisively, he won't have much time to celebrate. Many of the nation's problems -- stimulating employment, reducing the deficit, controlling health-care costs, and improving the quality of education -- are very serious, and some of them must be addressed with great urgency. And none of these problems can be addressed simply by waving a magic government wand. To a significant degree, they all involve understanding what motivates current practices -- of business-people, financiers, doctors, patients, teachers, students -- and what levers we may be able to use to change those practices.

Historically, when the need has arisen to change behavior, political leaders have turned to economists. That's one reason why presidents have a Council of Economic Advisers. When economists speak, presidents listen. And when economists have the president's ear, all their whispers are predicated on a set of assumptions about human behavior. Whether it's increasing GDP, reducing unemployment, sustaining Social Security, making sure people are financially prepared for retirement, or stabilizing the financial sector, economists commonly hold certain beliefs. They will for example argue that people are motivated by self-interest and are rational calculators of their interests, and that the most effective way to get people to change the way they behave is by creating the right material incentives.

(cut)

There is also growing evidence, some of it provided by psychologists Carol Dweck and Angela Duckworth, that the focus on beefing up the cognitive components of education that has dominated reform for the last 30 years may be misplaced. More important may be efforts to cultivate motivation and character (Paul Tough's remarkable new book, How Children Succeed, provides a vivid summary of this work). The importance of character and motivation suggests that the drill-and-test model of education that has become so common may actually be not just ineffective, but counterproductive.

The entire story is here.

The Half-Life Of Facts: Sam Arbesman at TEDxKC

Editorial note: The following video is about the half-life of facts.  Many lessons can be learned in this brief and fascinating presentation about our knowledge base related to psychology, ethics and ethical decision-making.