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

Tuesday, August 5, 2014

Foreclosures Drive up Suicide Rate

Press Release
Originally released May 18, 2014

The recent U.S. foreclosure crisis contributed significantly to the nation’s jump in suicides, independent of other economic factors associated with the Great Recession, according to a new study by Dartmouth and Purdue University professors.

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“It seems that foreclosures affect suicide rates in two ways,” says co-author Jason Houle, an assistant professor of sociology at Dartmouth. “The loss of a home clearly impacts individuals and families, and can arouse feelings of loss, shame or regret. At the same time, rising foreclosure rates affect entire communities because they’re associated with a number of community-level resources and stresses, including an increase in crime, abandoned homes, and a sense of insecurity.”

The entire press release is here.

Jason N. Houle and Michael T. Light.  The Home Foreclosure Crisis and Rising Suicide Rates, 2005 to 2010. American Journal of Public Health: June 2014, Vol. 104, No. 6, pp. 1073-1079.
doi: 10.2105/AJPH.2013.301774

When Hearing Voices Is a Good Thing

A new study suggests that schizophrenic people in more collectivist societies sometimes think their auditory hallucinations are helpful.

By Olga Khazan
The Atlantic
Originally posted July 23, 2014

Here are two excerpts:

But a new study suggests that the way schizophrenia sufferers experience those voices depends on their cultural context. Surprisingly, schizophrenic people from certain other countries don't hear the same vicious, dark voices that Holt and other Americans do. Some of them, in fact, think their hallucinations are good—and sometimes even magical.

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The Americans tended to described their voices as violent—"like torturing people, to take their eye out with a fork, or cut someone's head and drink their blood, really nasty stuff," according to the study.

The entire article is here.

Monday, August 4, 2014

Bottlenecks in Training Doctors

By The Editorial Board
The New York Times
Originally published July 19, 2014

The new head of the Department of Veterans Affairs, Sloan Gibson, told a Senate committee last week that he needed $17.6 billion over the next three years to hire some 1,500 doctors, 8,500 nurses and other clinicians to reduce the unconscionably long waiting times that many veterans now endure before they are able to see a doctor.

That news was bad enough, but the department’s problems are emblematic of an even deeper problem: a nationwide shortage of doctors, especially primary care doctors, and other health care professionals, that will only get worse in coming years. No less alarming, the current medical education system is ill-equipped to train the number of professionals needed.

Experts disagree over how bad the current shortages are. But virtually all agree that the problem is acute in rural areas and in poor urban neighborhoods. As of June 19, according to one estimate cited by analysts in the Department of Health and Human Services, there was a shortage of 16,000 primary care physicians in such underserved areas.

The entire story is here.

Ethics & Free Will

by Mike LaBossiere
Talking Philosophy Blog
Originally published on July 18, 2014

Here is an excerpt:

One impact is that when people have doubts about free will they tend to have less support for retributive punishment. Retributive punishment, as the name indicates, is punishment aimed at making a person suffer for her misdeeds. Doubt in free will did not negatively impact a person’s support for punishment aimed at deterrence or rehabilitation.

While the authors do consider one reason for this, namely that those who doubt free will would regard wrongdoers as analogous to harmful natural phenomenon that need to dealt with rather than subject to vengeance, this view also matches a common view about moral accountability. To be specific, moral (and legal) accountability is generally proportional to the control a person has over events. To use a concrete example, consider the difference between these two cases. In the first case, Sally is driving well above the speed limit and is busy texting and sipping her latte. She doesn’t see the crossing guard frantically waving his sign and runs over the children in the cross walk. In case two, Jane is driving the speed limit and children suddenly run directly in front of her car. She brakes and swerves immediately, but she hits the children. Intuitively, Sally has acted in a way that was morally wrong—she should have been going the speed limit and she should have been paying attention. Jane, though she hit the children, did not act wrongly—she could not have avoided the children and hence is not morally responsible.

The entire blog post is here.

Sunday, August 3, 2014

Do Smoking Policy Interventions Affect Suicide Risk?

By Richard A. Grucza, Andrew D. Plunk and others
Nicotine Tob Res (2014)
doi: 10.1093/ntr/ntu106
First published online: July 16, 2014

Introduction: 

Smokers exhibit elevated risk for suicide, but it is unknown whether smoking interventions reduce suicide risk. We examined whether state-level policy interventions—increases in cigarette excise taxes and strengthening of smoke-free air laws—corresponded to reduction in suicide risk during the 1990s and early 2000s. We also examined whether the magnitude of such reductions correlated with individuals’ predicted probability of smoking, as would be expected if the associations stemmed from changes in smoking behavior.

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Results: 

Cigarette excise taxes, smoke-free air policies, and an index combining the two policies all exhibited protective associations with suicide. The associations were strongest in segments of the population where predicted smoking prevalence was the highest and weaker in segments of the population where predicted smoking prevalence was the lowest, suggesting that the protective associations were related to changes in smoking behavior.

The entire article is here, behind a paywall.

Editor's note: While it is unclear if smoking itself leads to suicidal behavior (doubtful) or makes existing mental impairments worse (either through sustained use or trying to quit), clinicians need to know that this could be an important part of evaluating suicide potential.

Here is an article of nicotine and mental illness.

Prisons are Unable to Afford New Effective Hep C Medication

Prisoners Unlikely to Benefit from New, Highly Effective Hepatitis C Treatment
Prison Legal News
Originally posted July 9, 2014

by Greg Dober

Hepatitis C (HCV) is a blood-borne virus that is typically spread through intravenous drug use (i.e., sharing needles), tattooing with non-sterile needles, and sharing razors, toothbrushes, nail clippers or other hygiene items that may be exposed to blood. It is often a chronic disease and, if left untreated, can lead to severe liver damage.

Recent good news in the battle against HCV, in the form of two new drugs that are highly effective in eliminating the virus, is tempered by the fact that the companies that produce the drugs have priced them at $60,000 to $80,000 per 12-week course of treatment. This high cost prices the medications beyond the reach of most prison and jail systems – which is especially troubling considering that a substantial number of prisoners are infected with HCV.

The entire article is here.

Saturday, August 2, 2014

Parole board psychologist admits he made up story

Frank Colistro had told KOIN 6 News he was shot during two different hostage negotiation operations

By Dan Tilkin
KOIN 6
Published: July 14, 2014

Frank Colistro, an influential Portland psychologist, told KOIN 6 News he was shot twice in the line of duty.

He now admits that was a lie.

Colistro is one of only five psychologists the Oregon Parole Board uses to evaluate inmates to help determine if they’re ready to be released from prison. He’s weighed in on countless cases, including very high-profile murders and rapes.

The entire story is here.



Friday, August 1, 2014

Is Neurolaw Conceptually Confused?

By Neil Levy
J Ethics. 2014 Jun 1;18(2):171-185.

Abstract

In Minds, Brains, and Law, Michael Pardo and Dennis Patterson argue that current attempts to use neuroscience to inform the theory and practice of law founder because they are built on confused conceptual foundations. Proponents of neurolaw attribute to the brain or to its parts psychological properties that belong only to people; this mistake vitiates many of the claims they make. Once neurolaw is placed on a sounder conceptual footing, Pardo and Patterson claim, we will see that its more dramatic claims are false or meaningless, though it might be able to provide inductive evidence for particular less dramatic claims (that a defendant may be lying, or lacks control over their behavior, for instance). In response, I argue that the central conceptual confusions identified by Pardo and Patterson are not confusions at all. Though some of the claims made by its proponents are hasty and sometimes they are confused, there are no conceptual barriers to attributing psychological properties to brain states. Neuroscience can play a role in producing evidence that is more reliable than subjective report or behavior; it therefore holds out the possibility of dramatically altering our self-conception as agents and thereby the law.

The entire article is here.

Moral Hazards & Legal Conundrums of Our Robot-Filled Future

By Greg Miller
Wired
Originally posted July 17, 2014

The robots are coming, and they’re getting smarter. They’re evolving from single-task devices like Roomba and its floor-mopping, pool-cleaning cousins into machines that can make their own decisions and autonomously navigate public spaces. Thanks to artificial intelligence, machines are getting better at understanding our speech and detecting and reflecting our emotions. In many ways, they’re becoming more like us.

Whether you find it exhilarating or terrifying (or both), progress in robotics and related fields like AI is raising new ethical quandaries and challenging legal codes that were created for a world in which a sharp line separates man from machine.

The entire article is here.