Anti-Gay Student's Suit Rejected

By Scott Jaschik
Inside Higer Ed

A federal appeals court has upheld the right of Augusta State University to enforce standards of its counseling graduate program -- even when a religious student objects to requirements to treat gay people in a nondiscriminatory manner.

While the ruling may be appealed, it represents a strong victory for advocates of counseling standards that require that students be trained to treat a range of clients in supportive, nonjudgmental ways. The student who sued Augusta State, and already lost in a lower court, maintained that her First Amendment rights were violated when the university required her to complete a "remediation plan" over her willingness to treat gay people.

She had stated her intent to recommend "conversion therapy" to gay clients and to tell them that they could choose to be straight. (A wide consensus among psychology and sexuality experts holds that people don't select their sexual orientation and that encouraging people to change their orientation can be seriously harmful to them.)

The student, Jennifer Keeton, argues that her religiously motivated beliefs are being challenged by Augusta State's policies -- and that a public university may not do so. Keeton was expelled when she declined to participate in the remediation plan, and she asked a federal district court and the appeals court to order her reinstatement in the program.

A three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit found that Augusta State had legitimate, nondiscriminatory reasons to enforce its rules. The counseling program's accreditation depended in part on adhering to a code of conduct, and faculty members believed it was their responsibility to train students to work with a wide range of clients, the court found. The decision placed the counseling department's actions at Augusta State in the broader context of faculty members training professionals who must pay attention to the ethics of various fields.

"Just as a medical school would be permitted to bar a student who refused to administer blood transfusions for religious reasons from participating in clinical rotations, so ASU may prohibit Keeton from participating in its clinical practicum if she refuses to administer the treatment it has deemed appropriate," says the decision.

"Every profession has its own ethical codes and dictates. When someone voluntarily chooses to enter a profession, he or she must comply with its rules and ethical requirements. Lawyers must present legal arguments on behalf of their clients, notwithstanding their personal views.... So too, counselors must refrain from imposing their moral and religious views on their clients."

Read more here.

Thanks to Ken Pope for this article.

Supreme Court hears case involving medical record disclosure

An HIV-positive pilot claims the government is liable for releasing his medical history during a joint-agency investigation.

By Alicia Gallegos, amednews staff. 
Originally posted Dec. 26, 2011.

The U.S. Supreme Court has heard oral arguments in a case centering on whether the government is liable for disclosing to another agency the medical history of an HIV-positive patient.

The Social Security Administration admits that it violated federal law when it shared a pilot's medical records with the Federal Aviation Administration. But government attorneys say the federal Privacy Act allows recovery for economic damages only, not for emotional distress.

The case emphasizes the importance of adhering to national privacy laws, such as the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, said Alexander Wohl, a law professor at the Washington College of Law and a contributor to the Supreme Court's blog.

"It reinforces the impact of those laws. Doctors have their own legal standards," but they still need to be careful not to violate their patients' privacy, he said.

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Case at a glance

Is the government liable for noneconomic damages for disclosing a person's medical records to another agency?

A federal court said no. The court ruled that the government violated the Privacy Act but is not responsible for noneconomic damages. The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals disagreed. It ruled that when a federal agency intentionally or willfully fails to uphold its record-keeping obligations under the law, Congress intended that the plaintiff be entitled to recover both pecuniary and nonpecuniary damages. The case is before the U.S. Supreme Court, which heard arguments Nov. 30.

Impact: Attorneys for the plaintiff say a ruling for the government would significantly limit recoveries for people whose privacy is violated by government agencies. In addition, whistle-blowers, including doctors, who report instances of fraud and abuse would face greater disincentives to expose misconduct. A ruling for the plaintiff would lead to more lawsuits against the government for overly broad claims related to the Privacy Act, government attorneys say. A decision is expected in 2012.

FederalAviation Administration v. Stanmore Cawthon Cooper, U.S. Supreme Court

The entire story can be read here.

Digital Data on Patients Raises Risk of Breaches

By Nicole Perlroth
Published 12/18/11
The New York Times: Technology

One afternoon last spring, Micky Tripathi received a panicked call from an employee. Someone had broken into his car and stolen his briefcase and company laptop along with it.

So began a nightmare that cost Mr. Tripathi’s small nonprofit health consultancy nearly $300,000 in legal, private investigation, credit monitoring and media consultancy fees. Not to mention 600 hours dealing with the fallout and the intangible cost of repairing the reputational damage that followed.

Mr. Tripathi’s nonprofit, the Massachusetts eHealth Collaborative in Waltham, Mass., works with doctors and hospitals to help digitize their patient records. His employee’s stolen laptop contained unencrypted records for some 13,687 patients — each record containing some combination of a patient’s name, Social Security number, birth date, contact information and insurance information — an identity theft gold mine.

His experience was hardly uncommon. As part of the 2009 stimulus bill, the federal government provides incentive payments to doctors and hospitals to adopt electronic health records. Some 57 percent of office-based physicians now use electronic health records, a 12 percent jump from last year, according to the Centers for Disease Control.

An unintended consequence is that as patient records have been digitized, health data breaches have surged. The number of reported breaches is up 32 percent this year from last year, according to the Ponemon Institute, a security research group. Those breaches cost the industry an estimated $6.5 billion last year. In almost half the cases, a lost or stolen phone or personal computer was responsible.

The entire story can be read here.

LV teacher gets state prison for sex with student

By MCT Information Services

The Pocono Record

Originally published December 20, 2011

A former Allen High School teacher wept in anguish Tuesday as a Lehigh County judge shocked the woman and her supporters by sending her to state prison for having sex with a 17-year-old student on prom weekend.

Ms. Marvelli

Gabrielle Suzanne Marvelli, 39, of Quakertown looked stunned as Judge Maria L. Dantos sentenced her to nine months to five years in state prison. About 15 friends and family members cried and shook their heads as Marvelli, who had been free on bail, was led off to prison. Marvelli wept loudly.

"You violated everything that a teacher is supposed to be," Dantos told Marvelli moments before issuing the sentence.

Marvelli had been seeking probation. Instead she got the maximum sentence under the law.

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The student, a senior who Marvelli had previously taught, was a week shy of his 18th birthday and Marvelli was on the staff at Allen when the tryst occurred.

The entire story is here.

Former Utah teacher gets prison for sex with student

By Roxana Orellana
The Salt Lake Tribune
Originally published December 16, 2011

Former drama teacher Jeremy Flygare delivered a tearful apology for having a sexual relationship with a 17-year-old student. But the girl’s mother called Flygare’s statements just another performance from an actor who has manipulated others and lied.

Jeremy Flygare

"Your honor, please send him to prison. He has no fear for the law. Has no respect for kids," the victim’s mother said in court. "This is going to be on our family for life, not for like a year."

On Friday, Judge Thomas Kay sentenced Flygare to prison for up to 15 years.

Flygare, 33, was charged in 2nd District Court with three counts of first-degree felony rape, which is punishable by up to life in prison.

The story is here.

Patrick Lott, Middle School Principal, Arrested For Allegedly Recording Boys Showering

By Laura Hibbard

The Huffington Post

Patrick Lott, 54

Patrick Lott, Bernardsville Middle School assistant principal, has been arrested for allegedly recording boys showering at Immaculata High School in Somerset County, N.J., where he was a volunteer, the NewJersey Journal reports.

Lott was arrested last week after authorities used a Superior Court search warrant to find videos of the nude teenagers in his home.

The whole story can be found here.

Mentally Ill flood ERs as States Cut Services

By Julie Steenhuysen and Jilian Mincer

Reuters

Originally published December 26, 2011

On a recent shift at a Chicago emergency department, Dr. William Sullivan treated a newly homeless patient who was threatening to kill himself.

"He had been homeless for about two weeks. He hadn't showered or eaten a lot. He asked if we had a meal tray," said Sullivan, a physician at the University of Illinois Medical Center at Chicago and a past president of the Illinois College of Emergency Physicians.

Sullivan said the man kept repeating that he wanted to kill himself. "It seemed almost as if he was interested in being admitted."

Across the country, doctors like Sullivan are facing a spike in psychiatric emergencies - attempted suicide, severe depression, psychosis - as states slash mental health services and the country's worst economic crisis since the Great Depression takes its toll.

This trend is taxing emergency rooms already overburdened by uninsured patients who wait until ailments become acute before seeking treatment.

"These are people without a previous psychiatric history who are coming in and telling us they've lost their jobs, they've lost sometimes their homes, they can't provide for their families, and they are becoming severely depressed," said Dr. Felicia Smith, director of the acute psychiatric service at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston.

Visits to the hospital's psychiatric emergency department have climbed 20 percent in the past three years.

The entire story is here.

Sybil in Her Own Words

By Patrick Suraci
The HuffingtonPost.com

I always wondered why universities deemed it necessary to teach Ethics courses. Wasn't this something you learned from your parents and childhood, as your superego, in Freudian terms, developed? Now I have learned the need to teach many people without values, especially narcissists, the ethical impact of their behavior towards other people.

This was made clear when I recently published Sybil In Her Own Words: The Untold Story of Shirley Mason, Her Multiple Personalities and Paintings. It is a follow-up to the case of a woman who had 16 personalities, then called Multiple Personality Disorder. Flora Schreiber wrote this story titled Sybil. The therapist, Dr. Cornelia Wilbur used unorthodox, but not unethical, treatment for ten years, such as, psychoanalysis, hypnosis and Sodium Pentothal which resulted in the complete integration of the 16 personalities. Sybil was the pseudonym for Shirley Mason who was born on January 25, 1923, in Dodge Center, Minnesota. She was an artistically gifted and shy only child. Her family was well known in this little town; therefore, her mother's bizarre behavior was overlooked. During Shirley's treatment the alternate personalities emerged and told of the abuse by her mother. Whenever her mother committed an atrocious attack on Shirley, she would split and development another personality to cope with the trauma.

Attacking the veracity of Sybil published in 1973 did not begin until April 24,1997, when Dr. Herbert Spiegel gave an interview to the New York Review of Books. He stated that Sybil was not a multiple, but rather an hysteric. He claimed to have hypnotized her, performed regression studies and filmed her for the class he taught at Columbia University, thus, discovering that Sybil's therapist, Dr. Cornelia Wilbur, had been: "helping her (Sybil) identifying aspects of her life, or perspectives, that she then called by name. By naming them this way she was reifying a memory of some kind and converting it into a 'personality'..." In fact, he accused Dr. Wilbur of implanting false memories, giving credence to this developing fanatical movement.

There entire article is here.

Another post on this topic can be found here.

APA's Guidelines on Multiculturalism

Multicultural Guideline