Professional Psychology: Collection Agencies, Confidentiality, Records, Treatment, and Staff Supervision in New Jersey

SUPERIOR COURT OF NEW JERSEY
APPELLATE DIVISION
DOCKET NO. A-4975-17T3

In the Matter of the Suspension or Revocation of the License of L. Barry Helfmann, Psy.D.

Here are two excerpts:

The complaint included five counts. It alleged Dr. Helfmann failed to do the following: take reasonable measures to protect confidentiality of the Partnership's patients' private health information; maintain permanent records that accurately reflected patient contact for treatment purposes; maintain records of professional quality; timely release records requested by a patient; and properly instruct and supervise temporary staff concerning patient confidentiality and record maintenance. The Attorney General sought sanctions under the UEA.

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The regulation is clear. The doctor's argument to the contrary, that a psychologist could somehow confuse his collection attorney with a patient's authorized representative, is refuted by the regulation's plain language as well as consideration of its entire context. The doctor's argument is without sufficient merit to warrant further discussion. R. 2:11-3(e)(1)(E).

We find nothing arbitrary about the Board's rejection of Dr. Helfmann's argument that he violated no rule or regulation because he relied on the advice of counsel in providing the Partnership's collection attorney with patients' confidential information. His assertion is contrary to the sworn testimony of the collection attorney who was deposed, as distinguished from another collection attorney with whom the doctor spoke in the distant past. The latter attorney's purported statement that confidential information might be necessary to resolve a patient's outstanding fee does not consider, let alone resolve, the propriety of a psychologist releasing such information in the face of clear statutory and regulatory prohibitions.

The Board found that Dr. Helfmann, not his collection attorneys, was charged with the professional responsibility of preserving his patients' confidential information. Perhaps the doctor's argument that he relied on the advice of counsel would have had greater appeal had he asked for a legal opinion on providing confidential patient information to collection attorneys in view of the psychologist-patient privilege and a specific regulatory prohibition against doing so absent a statutory or traditional exception. That the Board found unpersuasive Dr. Helfmann's hearsay testimony about what attorneys told him years ago is hardly arbitrary and capricious, considering the Partnership's current collection attorney's testimony and Dr. Helfmann's statutory and regulatory obligations to preserve confidentiality.

The decision is here.

Unusual Legal Case: Small Social Circles, Boundaries, and Harm

This legal case shows how much our social circles interrelate and how easily boundaries can be violated.  If you ever believe that you are safe from boundary violations in a current, complex culture, you may want to rethink this position.  A lesson for all in this legal case.  I will excerpt a fascinating portion of this case.

Roetzel and Andres
jdsupra.com
Originally posted 10 June 20

Possible Employer Vicarious Liability For Employee’s HIPAA Violation Even When Employee Engages In Unauthorized Act

Here is the excerpt:

When the plaintiff came in for her appointment, she handed the Parkview employee a filled-out patient information sheet. The employee then spent about one-minute inputting that information onto Parkview’s electronic health record. The employee recognized the plaintiff’s name as someone who had liked a photo of the employee’s husband on his Facebook account. Suspecting that the plaintiff might have had, or was then having, an affair with her husband, the employee sent some texts to her husband relating to the fact the plaintiff was a Parkview patient. Her texts included information from the patient chart that the employee had created from the patient’s information sheet, such as the patient’s name, her position as a dispatcher, and the underlying reasons for the plaintiff’s visit to the OB/Gyn. Even though such information was not included on the chart, the employee also texted that the plaintiff was HIV-positive and had had more than fifty sexual partners. While using the husband’s phone, the husband’s sister saw the texts. The sister then reported the texts to Parkview. Upon receipt of the sister’s report, Parkview initiated an investigation into the employee’s conduct and ultimately terminated the employee. As part of that investigation, Parkview notified the plaintiff of the disclosure of her protected health information.

The info is here.

Want To See Your Therapist In-Person Mid-Pandemic? Think Again

Todd Essig
Forbes.com
Originally posted 27 June 20

Here is an excerpt:

Psychotherapy is built on a promise; you bring your suffering to this private place and I will work with you to keep you safe and help you heal. That promise is changed by necessary viral precautions. First, the possibility of contact tracing weakens the promise of confidentiality. I promise to keep this private changes to a promise to keep it private unless someone gets sick and I need to contact the local health department.

Even more powerful is the fact that a mid-pandemic in-person psychotherapy promise has to include all the ways we will protect each other from very real dangers, hardly the experience of psychological safety. There will even be a promise to pretend we are safe together even when we are doing so many things to remind us we are each the source of a potentially life-altering infection.

When I imagine how my caseload would react were I to begin mid-pandemic in-person work, like I did for a recent webinar for the NYS Psychological Association, I anticipate as many people welcoming the chance to work together on a shared project of viral safety as I do imagining those who would feel devastated or burdened. But even for the first group of willing co-participants, it is important to see that such a joint project of mutual safety is not psychotherapy. No anticipated reaction included the experience of psychological safety on which effective psychotherapy rests.

Rather than feeling safe enough to address the private and dark, patients/clients will each in their own way labor under the burden of keeping themselves, their families, their therapist, other patients, and office staff safe. The vigilance required to remain safe will inevitably reduce the therapeutic benefits one might hope would develop from being back in the office.

The article is here.

Why Sex? Biologists Find New Explanations.

Christie Wilcox
Quanta Magazine
Originally posted 23 April 20

Here are several excerpts:

The immediate benefit of sex for the algae is that they form resistant diploid spores that can outlast a bad environment. When better conditions return, the algal cells return to their haploid state through meiosis. But as Nedelcu and her colleagues point out, the process of meiosis also offers unique opportunities for genomic improvement that go beyond diversity.

Like all multicellular organisms, these algae have ways of healing small breaks or errors in their DNA. But if the damage is bad enough, those mechanisms struggle to accurately repair it. In those cases, having a second copy of that strand of DNA to use as a template for the repairs can be a lifesaver. “That’s basically what most organisms have by being diploid,” Nedelcu explained.

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Such indirect benefits may extend far beyond meiosis. “Sex also refers to copulation and sexual behaviors,” McDonough said. Researchers studying everything from crickets to mice are starting to see that having sex can have all sorts of unexpected upsides.

Unexpected, that is, because it’s generally assumed not only that sex is inefficient compared to asexual reproduction, but that it imposes an energy burden on the individuals involved. Producing eggs or sperm, finding a mate, the act of mating — all of it takes energy and resources. Consequently, there’s a trade-off between reproduction and other things an organism might do to survive longer, such as growing bigger or bolstering its immune system.

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Of course, those consequences go both ways: Cultural beliefs and views on sex influence how we go about studying and interpreting the results from research on other organisms. Our biases regarding sexual activity — like which kinds are or aren’t “normal” or proper — “have essentially affected what it is that we’ve deemed important to study in animals,” Worthington said.

McDonough agrees that our preconceptions of what sex should look like and the reasons why an individual should or shouldn’t have it have biased our understanding of animal behavior. They point to the research on same-sex behaviors in animals as a prime example of this. McDonough and their colleagues noticed that the scientific discourse surrounding same-sex behaviors involves a lot of weak or baseless assumptions — for example, that engaging in sexual acts is inherently costly, so same-sex sexual interactions must provide some overwhelming benefit, such as a large increase in lifetime reproductive output, for the behavior to arise and stick around through natural selection. But “in many situations, it isn’t costly, and it may have some kind of benefit that we don’t understand,” McDonough said.

The info is here.

Universal basic income seems to improve employment and well-being

Donna Lu
New Scientist
Originally post 6 May 20

The world’s most robust study of universal basic income has concluded that it boosts recipients’ mental and financial well-being, as well as modestly improving employment.

Finland ran a two-year universal basic income study in 2017 and 2018, during which the government gave 2000 unemployed people aged between 25 and 58 monthly payments with no strings attached.

The payments of €560 per month weren’t means tested and were unconditional, so they weren’t reduced if an individual got a job or later had a pay rise. The study was nationwide and selected recipients weren’t able to opt out, because the test was written into legislation.

Minna Ylikännö at the Social Insurance Institution of Finland announced the findings in Helsinki today via livestream.

The study compared the employment and well-being of basic income recipients against a control group of 173,000 people who were on unemployment benefits.

Between November 2017 and October 2018, people on basic income worked an average of 78 days, which was six days more than those on unemployment benefits.

There was a greater increase in employment for people in families with children, as well as those whose first language wasn’t Finnish or Swedish – but the researchers aren’t yet sure why.

When surveyed, people who received universal basic income instead of regular unemployment benefits reported better financial well-being, mental health and cognitive functioning, as well as higher levels of confidence in the future.

The info is here.

The economics of faith: using an apocalyptic prophecy to elicit religious beliefs in the field

Augenblick, N., Cunha, J. M., Dal Bo, E.
and Rao, J. M.
Journal of Public Economics
Volume 141, September 2016, Pages 38-49

Abstract

We model religious faith as a “demand for beliefs,” following the logic of the Pascalian wager. We show how standard experimental interventions linking financial consequences to falsifiable religious statements can elicit and characterize beliefs. We implemented this approach with members of a group that expected the “End of the World” to occur on May 21, 2011 by varying monetary prizes payable before and after May 21st. To our knowledge, this is the first incentivized elicitation of religious beliefs ever conducted. The results suggest that the members held extreme, sincere beliefs that were unresponsive to experimental manipulations in price.

Highlights
• We present a model of religious faith and show how standard experimental interventions can characterize beliefs.

• We implement the approach with people who expected the Apocalypse on May 21, 2011 by varying prizes payable before and after May 21.

• The results suggest the members held extreme, sincere beliefs that were unresponsive to experimental manipulations in price.

The paper is here.

Disasters and Community Resilience: Spanish Flu and the Formation of Retail Cooperatives in Norway

H. Rao and H. R. Greve
Academy of Management Journal
Vol. 61, No. 1

Abstract

Why are some communities resilient in the face of disasters, and why are others unable to recover? We suggest that two mechanisms matter: the framing of the cause of the disaster, and the community civic capacity to form diverse non-profits. We propose that disasters that are attributed to other community members weaken cooperation and reduce the formation of new cooperatives that serve the community, unlike disasters attributed to chance or to nature, which strengthen cooperation and increase the creation of cooperatives. We analyze the Spanish Flu, a contagious disease that was attributed to infected individuals, and compare it with spring frost, which damaged crops and was attributed to nature. Our measure of resilience is whether the community members could form retail cooperatives—non-profit community organizations. We find that communities hit by the Spanish Flu during the period 1918–1919 were unable to form new retail cooperatives in the short and long run after the epidemic, but this effect was reduced over time and countered by civic capacity. Implications for research on disasters and institutional legacies are outlined.

From the Discussion:

Our primary interest is in contagious disease outbreaks (such as the Spanish Flu) as an instance of disasters attributed to other community members, and we use weather shocks as a contrasting example of disasters attributed to nature. We find that disasters attributed to other community members weaken cooperation, increase suspicion and distrust of the other, and lead to a long-term (with a declining effect) reduction in organization building. By contrast, disasters attributed to an act of nature evoke a sense of shared fate which fosters cooperation, although with short term effect. These findings suggest that disasters are not merely physical events but socially constructed as well.

The research is here.

Record-Low 54% in U.S. Say Death Penalty Morally Acceptable

Megan Brenan
gallup.com
Originally posted 23 June 20

A record-low 54% of Americans consider the death penalty to be morally acceptable, marking a six-percentage-point decrease since last year. This finding, from Gallup's May 1-13 Values and Beliefs poll, is in line with polling last fall that showed decreased public support for the death penalty and a record-high preference for life imprisonment over the death penalty as a better punishment for murder.

Gallup has measured Americans' beliefs about the moral acceptability of the death penalty and numerous other social issues each May since 2001.

This year, 40% of U.S. adults think the death penalty is morally wrong, the highest in Gallup's 20-year trend. The high point in the public's belief that the death penalty is morally acceptable, 71%, was in 2006. That year and again in 2007, it topped the list of issues rated for moral acceptability.

The latest decrease in the public's tolerance for the death penalty is largely owed to political liberals and moderates. While two-thirds of conservatives still consider it to be morally acceptable, moderates (56%) and liberals (37%) are at their lowest levels since 2001.

The info is here.

And, oddly enough, smoking marijuana is more morally acceptable (by a small percent) than gay or lesbian relationships.

Debunking the Secular Case for Religion

Gurwinder Bhogal
rabbitholemag.com
Originally published 28 April 20

Here is an excerpt:

Could we, perhaps, identify the religious traditions that protect civilizations by looking at our history and finding the practices common to all long-lived civilizations? After all, Taleb has claimed that religion is “Lindy;” that is to say it has endured for a long time and therefore must be robust. But the main reason religious teachings have been robust is not that they’ve stood the test of time, but that those who tried to change them tended to be killed. Taleb also doesn’t explain what happens when religious practices differ or clash. Should people follow the precepts of the hardline Wahhabi brand of Islam, or those of a more moderate one? If the Abrahamic religions agree that usury leads to recessions, which of them do we consult on eating pork? Do we follow the Old Testament’s no or the New Testament’s yes, the green light of Christianity or the red light of Islam and Judaism?

Neither Taleb nor Peterson appear to answer these questions. But many evolutionary psychologists have: they say we should not blindly accept any religious edict, because none contain any inherent wisdom. The dominant view among evolutionary psychologists is that religion is not an evolutionary adaptation but a “spandrel,” a by-product of other adaptations. Richard Dawkins has compared religion to the tendency of moths to fly into flames: the moth did not evolve to fly into flames; it evolved to navigate by the light of the moon. Since it’s unable to distinguish between moonlight and candlelight, its attempt to keep a candle-flame in a fixed ommatidium (unit of a compound eye) causes it to keep veering around the flame, until it spirals into it. Dawkins argues that religion didn’t evolve for a purpose; it merely exploits the actual systems we evolved to navigate the world. An example of such a system might be what psychologist Justin Barrett calls the Hyperactive Agent Detection Device, the propensity to see natural phenomena as products of design. Basically, in our evolutionary history, mistaking a natural phenomenon for an artifact was far less risky than mistaking an artifact for a natural phenomenon, so our brains erred toward the former.

The info is here.