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

Sunday, December 31, 2017

VA knowingly hires doctors with past malpractice claims, discipline for poor care

Donovan Slack
USA Today
Originally published December 3, 2017

Here is an excerpt:

A VA hospital in Oklahoma knowingly hired a psychiatrist previously sanctioned for sexual misconduct who went on to sleep with a VA patient, according to internal documents. A Louisiana VA clinic hired a psychologist with felony convictions. The VA ended up firing him after they determined he was a “direct threat to others” and the VA’s mission.

As a result of USA TODAY’s investigation of Schneider, VA officials determined his hiring — and potentially that of an unknown number of other doctors — was illegal.

Federal law bars the agency from hiring physicians whose license has been revoked by a state board, even if they still hold an active license in another state. Schneider still has a license in Montana, even though his Wyoming license was revoked.

VA spokesman Curt Cashour said agency officials provided hospital officials in Iowa City with “incorrect guidance” green-lighting Schneider’s hire. The VA moved to fire Schneider last Wednesday. He resigned instead.

The article is here.

Saturday, December 30, 2017

Are There Non-human Persons? Are There Non-person Humans?

Glenn Cohen | TEDxCambridge
Published October 24, 2017



If we want to live a moral life, how should we treat animals or complex artificial intelligence? What kinds of rights should non-humans have? Harvard Law Professor and world-renowned bioethics expert Glenn Cohen shares how our current moral vocabulary may be leading us into fundamental errors and how to face the complex moral world around us. Glenn Cohen is one of the world’s leading experts on the intersection of bioethics and the law, as well as health law. He is an award-winning speaker and writer having authored more than 98 articles and chapters appearing in countless journals and gaining coverage on ABC, CNN, MSNBC, PBS, the New York Times and more. He recently finished his role as one of the project leads on the multi-million dollar Football Players Health Study at Harvard aimed at improving NFL player health.

Friday, December 29, 2017

Freud in the scanner

M. M. Owen
aeon.co
Originally published December 7, 2017

Here is an excerpt:

This is why Freud is less important to the field than what Freud represents. Researching this piece, I kept wondering: why hang on to Freud? He is an intensely polarising figure, so polarising that through the 1980s and ’90s there raged the so-called Freud Wars, fighting on one side of which were a whole team of authors driven (as the historian of science John Forrester put it in 1997) by the ‘heartfelt wish that Freud might never have been born or, failing to achieve that end, that all his works and influence be made as nothing’. Indeed, a basic inability to track down anyone with a dispassionate take on psychoanalysis was a frustration of researching this essay. The certitude that whatever I write here will enrage some readers hovers at the back of my mind as I think ahead to skimming the comments section. Preserve subjectivity, I thought, fine, I’m onboard. But why not eschew the heavily contested Freudianism for the psychotherapy of Irvin D Yalom, which takes an existentialist view of the basic challenges of life? Why not embrace Viktor Frankl’s logotherapy, which prioritises our fundamental desire to give life meaning, or the philosophical tradition of phenomenology, whose first principle is that subjectivity precedes all else?

Within neuropsychoanalysis, though, Freud symbolises the fact that, to quote the neuroscientist Ramachandran’s Phantoms in the Brain (1998), you can ‘look for laws of mental life in much the same way that a cardiologist might study the heart or an astronomer study planetary motion’. And on the clinical side, it is simply a fact that before Freud there was really no such thing as therapy, as we understand that word today. In Yalom’s novel When Nietzsche Wept (1992), Josef Breuer, Freud’s mentor, is at a loss for how to counsel the titular German philosopher out of his despair: ‘There is no medicine for despair, no doctor for the soul,’ he says. All Breuer can recommend are therapeutic spas, ‘or perhaps a talk with a priest’.

The article is here.

Leadership and Counseling Psychology: Dilemmas, Ambiguities, and Possibilities

Sandra Shullman
The Counseling Psychologist
First published November 28, 2017

Abstract

In this article, I introduce the scientist–practitioner–advocate–leader model as a strategy for addressing the rapidly changing context for psychologists and psychology. The concept of counseling psychologists as learning leaders is derived from the foundations and values of the profession. Incorporating leadership as a core identity for counseling psychologists may create new directions for science and practice as we increasingly integrate multicultural identities, training, and diverse personal backgrounds into social justice initiatives. The article presents six dilemmas faced by counseling psychologists in assuming leadership as part of professional identity, as well as eight learning leader behaviors that counseling psychologists could integrate in their management of ambiguity and uncertainty across various levels of human organization. The article concludes with a discussion of future possibilities that may arise by adopting leadership as part of the role and core identity of counseling psychology.

The article is here.

Thursday, December 28, 2017

‘Politicians want us to be fearful. They’re manipulating us for their own interest'

Decca Aitkenhead
The Guardian
Originally published December 8, 2017

Here are two excerpts:

“Yes, I hate to say it, but yes. Democracy is an advance past the tribal nature of our being, the tribal nature of society, which was there for hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of years. It’s very easy for us to fall back into our tribal, evolutionary nature – tribe against tribe, us against them. It’s a very powerful motivator.” Because it speaks to our most primitive self? “Yes, and we don’t realise how powerful it is.” Until we have understood its power, Bargh argues, we have no hope of overcoming it. “So that’s what we have to do.” As he writes: “Refusing to believe the evidence, just to maintain one’s belief in free will, actually reduces the amount of free will that person has.”

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Participants were asked to fill out an anonymous questionnaire devised to reveal their willingness to use power over a woman to extract sexual favours if guaranteed to get away with it. Some were asked to rate a female participant’s attractiveness. Others were first primed by a word-association technique, using words such as “boss”, “authority”, “status” and “power”, and then asked to rate her. Bargh found the power-priming made no difference whatsoever to men who had scored low on sexual harassment and aggression tendencies. Among men who had scored highly, however, it was a very different case. Without the notion of power being activated in their brains, they found her unattractive. She only became attractive to them once the idea of power was active in their minds.

This, Bargh suggests, might explain how sexual harassers can genuinely tell themselves: “‘I’m behaving like anybody does when they’re attracted to somebody else. I’m flirting. I’m asking her out. I want to date her. I’m doing everything that you do if you’re attracted to somebody.’ What they don’t realise is the reason they’re attracted to her is because of their power over her. That’s what they don’t get.”

The article is here.

Why are America's farmers killing themselves in record numbers?

Debbie Weingarten
The Guardian
Originally published December 6, 2017

Here is an excerpt:

“Farming has always been a stressful occupation because many of the factors that affect agricultural production are largely beyond the control of the producers,” wrote Rosmann in the journal Behavioral Healthcare. “The emotional wellbeing of family farmers and ranchers is intimately intertwined with these changes.”

Last year, a study by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) found that people working in agriculture – including farmers, farm laborers, ranchers, fishers, and lumber harvesters – take their lives at a rate higher than any other occupation. The data suggested that the suicide rate for agricultural workers in 17 states was nearly five times higher compared with that in the general population.

After the study was released, Newsweek reported that the suicide death rate for farmers was more than double that of military veterans. This, however, could be an underestimate, as the data collected skipped several major agricultural states, including Iowa. Rosmann and other experts add that the farmer suicide rate might be higher, because an unknown number of farmers disguise their suicides as farm accidents.

The US farmer suicide crisis echoes a much larger farmer suicide crisis happening globally: an Australian farmer dies by suicide every four days; in the UK, one farmer a week takes his or her own life; in France, one farmer dies by suicide every two days; in India, more than 270,000 farmers have died by suicide since 1995.

The article is here.

Wednesday, December 27, 2017

The Phenomenon of ‘Bud Sex’ Between Straight Rural Men

Jesse Singal
thecut.com
Originally posted December 18, 2016

A lot of men have sex with other men but don’t identify as gay or bisexual. A subset of these men who have sex with men, or MSM, live lives that are, in all respects other than their occasional homosexual encounters, quite straight and traditionally masculine — they have wives and families, they embrace various masculine norms, and so on. They are able to, in effect, compartmentalize an aspect of their sex lives in a way that prevents it from blurring into or complicating their more public identities. Sociologists are quite interested in this phenomenon because it can tell us a lot about how humans interpret thorny questions of identity and sexual desire and cultural expectations.

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Specifically, Silva was trying to understand better the interplay between “normative rural masculinity” — the set of mores and norms that defines what it means to be a rural man — and these men’s sexual encounters. In doing so, he introduces a really interesting and catchy concept, “bud-sex”...

The article is here.

The Desirability of Storytellers

Ed Young
The Atlantic
Originally posted December 5, 2017

Here are several excerpts:

Storytelling is a universal human trait. It emerges spontaneously in childhood, and exists in all cultures thus far studied. It’s also ancient: Some specific stories have roots that stretch back for around 6,000 years. As I’ve written before, these tales aren’t quite as old as time, but perhaps as old as wheels and writing. Because of its antiquity and ubiquity, some scholars have portrayed storytelling as an important human adaptation—and that’s certainly how Migliano sees it. Among the Agta, her team found evidence that stories—and the very act of storytelling—arose partly as a way of cementing social bonds, and instilling an ethic of cooperation.

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In fact, the Agta seemed to value storytelling above all else. Good storytellers were twice as likely to be named as ideal living companions as more pedestrian tale spinners, and storytelling acumen mattered far more all the other skills. “It was highly valued, twice as much as being a good hunter,” says Migliano. “We were puzzled.”

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Skilled Agta storytellers are more likely to receive gifts, and they’re not only more desirable as living companions—but also as mates. On average, they have 0.5 more children than their peers. That’s a crucial result. Stories might help to knit communities together, but evolution doesn’t operate for the good of the group. If storytelling is truly an adaptation, as Migliano suggests, it has to benefit individuals who are good at it—and it clearly does.

“It’s often said that telling stories, and other cultural practices such as singing and dancing, help group cooperation, but real-world tests of this idea are not common,” says Michael Chwe, a political scientist at the University of California, Los Angeles, who studies human cooperation. “The team’s attempt to do this is admirable.”

The article is here.

Tuesday, December 26, 2017

When Morals Ain’t Enough: Robots, Ethics, and the Rules of the Law

Pagallo, U.
Minds & Machines (2017) 27: 625.
https://doi.org/10.1007/s11023-017-9418-5

Abstract

No single moral theory can instruct us as to whether and to what extent we are confronted with legal loopholes, e.g. whether or not new legal rules should be added to the system in the criminal law field. This question on the primary rules of the law appears crucial for today’s debate on roboethics and still, goes beyond the expertise of robo-ethicists. On the other hand, attention should be drawn to the secondary rules of the law: The unpredictability of robotic behaviour and the lack of data on the probability of events, their consequences and costs, make hard to determine the levels of risk and hence, the amount of insurance premiums and other mechanisms on which new forms of accountability for the behaviour of robots may hinge. By following Japanese thinking, the aim is to show why legally de-regulated, or special, zones for robotics, i.e. the secondary rules of the system, pave the way to understand what kind of primary rules we may want for our robots.

The article is here.