Burnout in Mental Health Professionals As helping professionals, we are trusted with some of our clients’ deepest, darkest secrets. Each day, we are subjected to the heart-wrenching ...
Should Physicians Be Experts on Cost? It was during my third year of medical school when I was first identified as a medical expert. A college friend asked my opinion about his father’s medical condition and assumed I would be helpful. “I don’t know anything, why is he asking me,” I thought.
Mental Notes: Letter to a Young Psychiatrist It’s easy to give advice, hard to receive it, harder still to live it. The privilege of youth is action; of age, experience. Nature resists combining both. Experience is a comb you get when you’re bald.
The Outlook for Mental Health Services: A Perfect Storm on Our Hands Funding for mental health services has never achieved top legislative priority, and reforms requiring parity succeeded only after years of hard-fought battles. After the 2007 brush with economic collapse, the recession, staggering unemployment, budget deficits, and sparse tax revenues, however, the situation has grown significantly worse.
Hypnosis and Medical Ethics in Germany When Leo Alexander, the psychiatrist who served as advisor at the Nuremberg doctors’ trial, helped draft the articles of the Nuremberg code, his attention was drawn to two earlier episodes in German medical history.
When Discipline Was the Therapy: Hans Fallada’s The Drinker Alcohol has had a long and checkered history in human affairs. Dating back millennia to ancient Egypt, its consumption has been associated with sacredness as well as frivolity. And since at least the ancient Greeks, moral authorities have argued for the virtues of moderation or outright abstinence in its consumption.
Tales from the New Asylum: The Valediction Whenever a suicide happens in the New Asylums, a palpable, muted dread descends over the institution. It stays there in full force for weeks and months afterwards, sometimes longer.
The Meaning of Life in a 15-Minute Med Check If William Blake were alive today,* maybe he’d start one of his famous stanzas with something like, “To see meaning in a 15-minute med check…” If not, I will. Here’s how I’ve come to justify this.
Celebrating Death A general is well advised
To achieve nothing more than his orders:
Not to take advantage of his victory.
Nor to glory, boast or pride himself;
To do what is dictated by necessity,
Not by choice.
For even the strongest force ...
