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Public Health: Left out on the Curb
Kicked to the Curb: Harvard's Public Health graduates sidelined as other students march on. Photo by Larisa Hausmanis (shamelessly stolen without permission)Yesterday, along with thousands of other...
View ArticleThe Tyranny of Choice: Or, Why Markets Do Not Work in Healthcare
Our politicians tell us that competition in the health sector increases patient choice. The patient is no longer a passive recipient of lackluster care, but an empowered consumer shopping around for...
View ArticleFree to Choose: Or, Why Markets Do Not Work in Healthcare Part II
The American Economist Milton Friedman, in his doctoral thesis, argued that licensing for physicians reduced the quality and quantity of medical practice. He went as far as saying licensure should be...
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The Psychopathology of American Life: How We All Became Mentally Ill
We are repeatedly told there is an hidden epidemic of mental illness. Photo from: http://www.irishexaminer.com/mentalillness ‘I’m severely depressed.’ These were the words that Donesha*, a 35 year-old...
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Are our mental health services driving people to suicide?
Admission to a psychiatric unit may be too brief to be effective but long enough to increase the risk of suicide. Photo from: http://blogs.nature.com/musings_and_moths/2012/01/26/teenage-dreamWhen...
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Worse than useless: when counseling harms
We must accept if counseling can heal, it can also harm.Counseling and non-directive psychotherapies are extremely popular forms of talking treatments. Chances are, you or someone you know has seen a...
View ArticlePublic Health: Safeguarding Liberty
Public health interventions are often charged with accusations of restricting civil freedoms. Whether it be taxing sugar sweetened beverages, banning smoking in public places, outlawing trans fats,...
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Let's Get This Straight: Homosexuality as a Modern Invention, A Western Disease
I picked up a copy of the Christian Examiner whilst sitting in a cafe in Pasadena. Photo by Vivek Datta“PROPOSED CALIFORNIA LAW WOULD DENY SAME-SEX ATTRACTION TREATMENT FOR TEENS”. So laments the front...
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Chemical Imbalances and Other Black Unicorns
Like a black unicorn we have created a dangerous mythology in promoting the idea mental illnesses are caused by chemical imbalances. “What do you think caused your problems?”, I asked. “I have a...
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The Denial of Pain and Mortality: Or, the Art of Self-Prescribing and the...
I couldn’t help but feel that as a physician I had been trained to be an archetypal overreacher like Andrew, to fly too close to the sun, to steal fire from the Gods to help my patient’s cheat death,...
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Prescribing Masturbation: An Idea Whose Time Has Come (Again)
Should vibrators be available on prescription and covered by healthcare plans?Masturbation is the most ubiquitous expression of good sexual health. Despite this, not a moment of my medical training was...
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Does DSM-5 Matter? Yes, but not to Psychiatrists.
It is an open secret that most psychiatrists do not use the DSM.Read the news and you may be forgiven for thinking there is some violent fervor about the release of DSM-5. Its arrival is apparently...
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Medicalizing Misery and the Loss of Social Suffering
The real money always lay not in convincing sick people they were ill, but well people they were sickThroughout the 1990s, the UK Royal College of Psychiatrists and Royal College of General...
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Science and Pseudoscience in Psychiatric Training: What Psychiatrists Don't...
Phrenology was a pseudoscience of the 19th century, based on the notion that skull morphology could reveal psychological attributes. The hodgepodge of models of mind today may be no better. Though...
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When Homosexuality Came Out (of the DSM)
the removal of homosexuality from the DSM was not the result of scientific advancement but political will41 years ago this month, homosexuality ceased to be a mental illness. Amid growing opposition...
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Psychiatry and the Problem With the Medical Model - Part 1
In The Myth of Mental Illness Thomas Szasz argued that mental illness was but a metaphor for problems in living. He still identified as a psychiatrist and was a member of the American Psychiatric...
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