How Not to Be Alone

By Jonathan Safran Foer
The New York Times - Opinion
Originally published June 8, 2013

Here is an excerpt:

Psychologists who study empathy and compassion are finding that unlike our almost instantaneous responses to physical pain, it takes time for the brain to comprehend the psychological and moral dimensions of a situation. The more distracted we become, and the more emphasis we place on speed at the expense of depth, the less likely and able we are to care.

Everyone wants his parent’s, or friend’s, or partner’s undivided attention — even if many of us, especially children, are getting used to far less. Simone Weil wrote, “Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity.” By this definition, our relationships to the world, and to one another, and to ourselves, are becoming increasingly miserly.

Most of our communication technologies began as diminished substitutes for an impossible activity. We couldn’t always see one another face to face, so the telephone made it possible to keep in touch at a distance. One is not always home, so the answering machine made a kind of interaction possible without the person being near his phone. Online communication originated as a substitute for telephonic communication, which was considered, for whatever reasons, too burdensome or inconvenient. And then texting, which facilitated yet faster, and more mobile, messaging. These inventions were not created to be improvements upon face-to-face communication, but a declension of acceptable, if diminished, substitutes for it.

But then a funny thing happened: we began to prefer the diminished substitutes. It’s easier to make a phone call than to schlep to see someone in person. Leaving a message on someone’s machine is easier than having a phone conversation — you can say what you need to say without a response; hard news is easier to leave; it’s easier to check in without becoming entangled. So we began calling when we knew no one would pick up.

The entire story is here.

Suspect in Colorado Killings Enters Insanity Plea

By Jack Healy
The New York Times
Originally posted on June 4, 2013

James E. Holmes, the former neuroscience student charged with killing 12 people inside a Colorado movie theater last July, changed his plea on Tuesday to not guilty by reason of insanity.

It was an expected shift in Mr. Holmes’s defense, formalized during a court hearing in this Denver suburb. As the judge read a lengthy document describing the legal consequences and psychiatric examinations that would follow the plea, Mr. Holmes, shackled and dressed in a red jail uniform, appeared to follow along on a copy, gazing down as one of his lawyers flipped the pages.

The entire story is here.

An Ethical Prohibition that Isn’t — And Never Really Was

By Robert E. Erard, Ph.D.
The National Psychologist
March 11, 2013

A decade after the 2002 APA Ethics Code and the HIPAA Privacy Rule should have settled the matter many psychologists continue to believe fervently that they have some special ethical duty to resist all formal requests for their raw test data, even when these requests are accompanied by releases from the test taker and even by subpoenas or court orders.

When asked for their test data, some psychologists claim paternalistically that nobody could ever understand what these mysterious numbers mean without being a licensed psychologist. They seem to ignore the fact that we ourselves have an ethical duty (Ethical Standard 9.10; APA, 2002) to provide test feedback (i.e., explaining those numbers), not to mention that most test publishers routinely sell test forms and computerized test interpretations to psychiatrists, social workers, counselors and others.

Other psychologists contend that either test copyrights or licensing agreements with test publishers prevent them from complying with these requests. They overlook the fact that the Fair Use Doctrine under the Copyright Act of 1976 (2011), the legal rights of test takers to their health care information and discovery rules governing the bases for experts’ opinions in forensic matters have consistently trumped these arguments when they have been put to the test (e.g., see Carpenter v. Yamaha, 2006).

The entire story is here.

A Simple Way to Reduce Suicides

By Ezekiel J. Emanuel
The New York Times - Opinionator
Originally published June 2, 2013

EVERY year about a million Americans attempt suicide. More than 38,000 succeed. In addition, each year there are around 33,000 unintentional deaths by poisonings. Taken together, that’s more than twice the number of people who die annually in car accidents.

The tragedy is that while motor vehicle deaths have been dropping, suicides and poisonings from medications have been steadily rising since 1999. About half of suicides are committed with firearms, and nearly 20 percent by poisoning. A good way to kill yourself is by overdosing on Tylenol or other pills. About 90 percent of the deaths from unintentional poisonings occur because of drugs, and not because of things like household cleaners or bleach.

There is a simple way to make medication less accessible for those who would deliberately or accidentally overdose — and that is packaging.

We need to make it harder to buy pills in bottles of 50 or 100 that can be easily dumped out and swallowed. We should not be selling big bottles of Tylenol and other drugs that are typically implicated in overdoses, like prescription painkillers and Valium-type drugs, called benzodiazepines. Pills should be packaged in blister packs of 16 or 25.

The entire opinion piece is here.

Pediatricians warned children of military personnel face mental health risks

By Ryan Jaslow
CBS News
Originally posted May 27, 2012

Children of military personnel may be at an increased risk for social, emotional and behavioral problems, according to a new report from the American Academy of Pediatrics.

Published May 27, Memorial Day, in the academy's journal Pediatrics, the new clinical report aims to raise awareness among pediatricians for the mental health needs for military children.

Authored by Dr. Ben S. Siegel and Dr. Beth Ellen Davis, who serve as members on the Committee On Psychosocial Aspects of Child and Family Health and Section on Uniformed Services, the report points out about 60 percent of U.S. service members have families while about 2.3 million military members have been deployed since the start of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq about a decade ago.

The entire article is here.

Prominent Hilton Head psychologist’s license revoked; Sex with patient alleged

By Alice Stice
The State (South Carolina News Site)
Originally published May 31, 2013

A prominent Hilton Head Island psychologist has had his license permanently revoked for having a sexual relationship with a patient that included intimate encounters in his office, according to an order from the S.C. Board of Examiners in Psychology.

Dr. Howard Rankin, a psychologist, neuropsychologist and author who has been featured in the national media, admitted the relationship to an investigator from the S.C. Department of Labor, Licensing & Regulation and is barred from practice after an April disciplinary hearing before the board, records show.

Rankin has been featured as an expert on addiction, weight loss and other fields in The Wall Street Journal and Los Angeles Times, and has appeared as a guest on CNN and ABC’s “The View” and “20/20.”

He declined to comment for this article.

According to the board’s order, a female patient diagnosed with borderline personality disorder and post-traumatic stress disorder began seeing Rankin for therapy in 2005. The patient, referred to only by her initials in the order, had attempted suicide on several occasions and had been hospitalized for psychiatric treatment more than once, the order says.

The entire story is here.

Human Subjects Research Landscape Project – Analysis Dataset

The Presidential Commission for the Study of Bioethics

In order to respond to President Obama’s November 24, 2010 charge “to determine if Federal regulations and international standards adequately guard the health and well-being of participants in scientific studies supported by the Federal Government,” the Commission recognized that a critical first step would be to define and understand the landscape of “scientific studies supported by the Federal Government.” Finding no comprehensive publicly available source for this information, the Commission asked the 18 federal departments and agencies that have adopted the Common Rule—and therefore were likely to support scientific studies with human subjects—to provide basic project-level data for department/agency-supported human subjects research in Fiscal Year 2006 to Fiscal Year 2010.

These data, which include study title, number and location of sites, number of subjects, and funding information, were compiled into the Commission’s Research Project Database, and analyzed as part of its Human Subjects Research Landscape Project.

Posted here is the Commission’s analysis dataset, which incorporates minimal data cleaning as detailed in “Appendix II: Human Subjects Research Landscape Project Methods.”  Also posted is a data dictionary that defines the dataset’s fields. The data are available in two formats: Microsoft Access and .CSV.  The Access file contains the same information as the three .CSV files.

As detailed in the Methods, department/agency-reported information in the dataset was not independently audited or verified.  Moreover, the dataset is static; no additional data will be added to it.

For further information, and to read the Human Subjects Research Landscape Project Methods, please see “Appendix I: Human Subjects Research Landscape Project: Scope and Volume of Federally Supported Human Subjects Research” and “Appendix II: Human Subjects Research Landscape Project Methods.”

The entire study is here.

SUPPORT Update: OHRP’s Compliance Actions on Hold

By John B. Lantos
The Hastings Center Bioethics Forum
Originally posted June 5, 2013

In a thoughtful, nuanced letter to the University of Alabama (the home of the Principal Investigator of the SUPPORT study), the Office for Human Research Protection announced that it has “put on hold all compliance actions against UAB relating to the SUPPORT case.”  Further, OHRP promises not to initiate compliance actions “in studies involving similar designs” until it clarifies the guidelines for such studies. In doing so, it acknowledges “widespread misunderstanding about the risks that are required to be disclosed in obtaining informed consent for certain types of studies.”  (Previous posts on the SUPPORT controversy are here, here, here, and here.)

OHRP promises that the process of drafting new guidelines will be “as open as possible, with input from all interested parties.”  To achieve this, it will “engage in the usual notice and comment process with regard to draft guidance” and “will also conduct an open public meeting on this topic.” This is a welcome development.

The letter also suggests the positions that OHRP will take in these discussions. It focuses on three main points.

First, the letter acknowledges that these discussions will focus on situations where the standard of care includes known and widespread practice variation with no reliable evidence on which practices are associated with which risks or benefits. “When the SUPPORT study was initiated,” it states, “there was no clear recent evidence indicating that different oxygenation levels with the then-current standard of care (85%- 95%) would produce differences in neurological damage or survival.”

The entire blog post is here.

Studying Childhood Morality via Social Groups and Cognition

Rhodes, M. (in press). Naive theories of social groups. Child Development.

Here are some excerpts from this paper regarding the importance of studying moral development.

Yet, despite preschoolers’ general commitment to fairness, the possibility that children view people as having special moral obligations to their own group members cannot be entirely ruled out. This possibility is consistent with several theoretical accounts of morality proposed by social and cultural psychologists (Cohen, Montoya, & Insko, 2006; Dovidio, 1984; Haidt & Joseph, 2007; Haidt & Kesebir, 2010; Levine, Cassidy, Brazier, & Reicher, 2002; Levine & Thompson, 2004), and there is recent developmental data that appear consistent with this possibility (Castelli, De Amicis, & Sherman, 2007; Rhodes & Brickman, 2011). Thus, this remains an important area for future work.

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Whereas the majority of research in this area has examined how children appeal to individual mental states to make these predictions, there has recently been increasing emphasis on understanding how children make these predictions by reference to social causes that extend beyond the individual, including social categories, norms, and morality (Hirschfeld, 1996; Olson & Dweck, 2008; Wellman & Miller, 2008). This emphasis—on considering children’s naı¨ve sociology along with their naive psychology—is particularly important given that preschool-age children often weight the causal features  specified by naive sociology (e.g., categories, norms) more heavily than individual mental states (e.g., traits, desires) to predict individual action (Berndt & Heller, 1986; Biernat, 1991; Diesendruck & haLevi, 2006; Kalish, 2002; Kalish & Shiverick, 2004; Lawson & Kalish, 2006; Rhodes & Gelman, 2008; Taylor, 1996).

The entire paper is here.