Thursday, September 20, 2012

Mothering (parenting) styles

Mothering (parenting) styles - working draft outline

Secure mothering (parenting)

Insecure mothering (parenting)

Psychotherapy and psychoeducation for mothers (parents) to be and in variations of mothering (parenting) styles

*
Opinion

Why Fathers Really Matter

Paul Blow
MOTHERHOOD begins as a tempestuously physical experience but quickly becomes a political one. Once a woman’s pregnancy goes public, the storm moves outside. Don’t pile on the pounds! Your child will be obese. Don’t eat too little, or your baby will be born too small. For heaven’s sake, don’t drink alcohol. Oh, please: you can sip some wine now and again. And no matter how many contradictory things the experts say, don’t panic. Stress hormones wreak havoc on a baby’s budding nervous system.
 

Tuesday, September 18, 2012

"Offences against Religion", Socrates' trial and Pussy Riot case

"Offences against Religion", Socrates' trial and Pussy Riot case

Unresolved mourning as psychopathology and underlying cause of some criminal and paracriminal behaviors

Unresolved mourning as psychopathology and underlying cause of some criminal and paracriminal behaviors





Notes

Various individual "stalking behaviors" can and should be viewed as manifestations of the disorders of attachment and separation (e.g. "unrequited love", or "obsessive love", which is, however, in want of some clarifications: what "true love" is not obsessive, and what is "love" anyway?)

Can the various officially sanctioned or private "surveillance behaviors" be viewed as "stalking" also? In principle, there is no difference between theses two types of behaviors, and, if anything, the "officially sanctioned stalking" is even much more intrusive, pervasive, powerful and potentially intimidating.
But the main features are the same: excessive and most of the time unwanted attention, warrantied or not.

It would be only logical and consistent with the values of modern Western cultures to classify these both types of behaviors (individual and group), regardless of their origins and directions as the offenses against privacy, if they exceed certain social and legal limits; the issue is to define these limits in both sufficiently stringent and sufficiently flexible ways.

References and Links


Unresolved mourning - Google Search

stalking - Google Search

 
Definitions
The difficulties associated with precisely defining this term (or defining it at all) are well documented.[2]
*
Gender studies of stalkers
According to one study, women often target other women, whereas men generally stalk women only.[10][11] However, a January 2009 report from the Department of Justice in the United States reports that "Males were as likely to report being stalked by a male as a female offender. 43% of male stalking victims stated that the offender was female, while 41% of male victims stated that the offender was another male. Female victims of stalking were significantly more likely to be stalked by a male (67%) rather than a female (24%) offender." This report provides considerable data by gender and race about both stalking and harassment.[12] The data for this report were obtained via the 2006 Supplemental Victimization Survey (SVS), conducted by the U.S. Census Bureau for the U.S. Department of Justice.[13]
*
Types of stalkers
Psychologists often group individuals who stalk into two categories: psychotic and nonpsychotic.[14] Stalkers may have pre-existing psychotic disorders such as delusional disorder, schizoaffective disorder, or schizophrenia. Most stalkers are nonpsychotic and may exhibit disorders or neuroses such as major depression, adjustment disorder, or substance dependence, as well as a variety of Axis II personality disorders (such as antisocial, borderline, dependent, narcissistic, or paranoid). Some of the symptoms of "obsessing" over a person is part of obsessive compulsive personality disorder. The nonpsychotic stalkers' pursuit of victims can be influenced by various psychological factors, including anger, hostility, projection of blame, obsession, dependency, minimization, denial, and jealousy. Conversely, as is more commonly the case, the stalker has no antipathic feelings towards the victim, but simply a longing that cannot be fulfilled due to deficiencies either in their personality or their society's norms.[15]
*
One of the uncertainties in understanding the origins of stalking is that the concept is now widely understood in terms of specific behaviors[18] which are found to be offensive and/or illegal. As discussed above, these specific (apparently stalking) behaviors may have multiple motivations.

In addition, the personality characteristics that are often discussed as antecedent to stalking may also produce behavior that is not stalking as conventionally defined. Some research suggests there is a spectrum of what might be called "obsessed following behavior." People who complain obsessively and for years, about a perceived wrong or wrong-doer, when no one else can perceive the injury—and people who cannot or will not "let go" of a person or a place or an idea—comprise a wider group of persons that may be problematic in ways that seem similar to stalking. Some of these people get extruded from their organizations—they may get hospitalized or fired or let go if their behavior is defined in terms of illegal stalking, but many others do good or even excellent work in their organizations and appear to have just one focus of tenacious obsession.[19] 

*





Sunday, September 16, 2012

Grant Proposal for establishment of the Puerto Rico Institute for Behavioral Criminology and Behavioral Forensic Sciences

Grant Proposal for establishment of the Puerto Rico Institute for Behavioral Criminology and Behavioral Forensic Sciences

To:
AP (Psychiatric) A
US Department of Justice: FBI and Department of Corrections
US Department of Health and Human Services
NIMH
The Office of the Governor of Puerto Rico

Dear madams and sirs:

I propose to establish the Puerto Rico Institute for Behavioral Criminology and Behavioral Forensic Sciences with the following purposes:

A. Theoretical:
  • To explore the associations between mental illnesses and criminality and to develop the efficient strategies for prevention and treatment of criminal behaviors.
  • To develop empirically based classification of mental disorders from criminological perspectives, geared towards better understanding of this association.
  • To summarize and monitor all available literature in the field (on the interdisciplinary basis), to digest and translate it into human languages (bilingually: English and Spanish) and to publish these digests with selected original articles on the web, free of any charges, for professionals and public. Unimpeded access to scientific information should be viewed as one of the "inalienable rights" rather than commodity; the benefits of free access to this information immeasurably outweigh the costs which should be bared by the government, along the lines of the Pubmed model. Scientific activity and public education cannot exist without the free flow of information.
  • To train the young professionals in the field on interdisciplinary basis and to develop the curricula and efficient strategies for their training.
  • To develop models for combined general mental health, crime prevention and prison health services.
  • To organize scientific meetings and conferences in the field on the national and international basis. Puerto Rico is the ideal location for it.
B. Practical
  • To develop the series of diagnostic and therapeutic video games for children and adults, including the prison populations; utilising individualised psychophysiological and psychotherapetic approaches.
  • To explore the use of blogging services for prisoners with diagnostic and therapeutic purposes.
  • To develop strategies for prison personnel training and participation in prisons mental health services.
Puerto Rico can become an ideal natural laboratory for development and testing of described above services, with their further implementation on a national basis.


Thursday, September 13, 2012

Behavioral Analysis of Criminogenic Situation in Puerto Rico - Outline of the working draft

Behavioral Analysis of Criminogenic Situation in Puerto Rico - Outline of the working draft

Behavioral Analysis of Crime and Criminogenic Situations - Outline of the working draft

Behavioral Analysis of Crime and Criminogenic Situations
Outline of the working draft
*
Crime and its causation


*
Notes

Adherence to Law is innate and is a part of "normal" and healthy psyche. The intricacies of Law are not taught to children and even to adults, however most of them do know the difference between "right and wrong" and what should or should not be done, and how they should or should not behave. The healthy and law abiding citizens, led by healthy and law abiding governments and their leaders make healthy and law abiding societies, which make healthy and lawful international order. Conversely, individual psychopathology is the main cause of social pathologies. This logically leads to the issue of role and importance of comprehensive  and scientifically empirically based mental health services.

Any religion contains interconnected moral and legal proscriptions which are perceived by their adherents as one and the same.

The Ten Commandments is the case in point.

The more complex is the social structure, the more complex (containing and integrating the seemingly contradictory and mutually exclusive aspects) is the set of moral rules and laws they have.

If the Law is mostly innate, then everyone has his/her "individual set of legal rules" which might or might not coincide, fully or partially, with the universally accepted sets.

These universal and individual sets are also class and culture bound.
"Quod licet Iovi, non licet bovi": what is allowed to jupiters usually is not allowed to bulls and vice versa; and since it is the jupiters, who make the rules, they "always win". Upper classes enjoy greater flexibility in observance and application of laws, which is balanced by their, usually, greater strength of inner law and the sense of responsibility; lower classes violate the written and unwritten laws more often because they were not written and established by them and are not necessarily accepted by them as inner moral and legal imperatives.

This individual, class and cultural variability creates a rather polymorphous legal environment.

Individual criminal activity usually forms a certain, internally lifetime consistent pattern, a "criminal profile", which is a behavioral expression of underlying individual psychopathology. Killers usually continue to kill, rapist continue to rape, thieves continue to steal, and the so called "psychopaths" continue to exploit and swindle, etc. The stability of this criminological patterns indicates the need to address and treat the underlying psychopathology rather than to apply the punishments, which are the forms of social retaliation rather then solution of the problem, and usually are ineffective, given the high rates of recidivism and, probably, paradoxically, reinforcing, due to associated overt or covert anger.
With all that, the behavioral approach: "tit for tat" and inevitability of punishment probably remain the most effective, historically formed interventions.

Criminogenic situations should be viewed as products of activities of criminal groups of various, hierarchically positioned, sizes: from small groups to various gangs to criminal societies.

*
Links and References

 *
Categorisation by type
The following classes of offences are used, or have been used, as legal terms of art:
Researchers and commentators have classified crimes into the following categories, in addition to those above:
*

Causes and correlates of crime
Many different causes and correlates of crime have been proposed with varying degree of empirical support. They include socioeconomic, psychological, biological, and behavioral factors. Controversial topics include media violence research and effects of gun politics.

*

 The causes of crime is one of the major research areas in criminology. A large number of narrow and broad theories have been proposed for explaining crime.

*

Criminal Triad Theory
Criminal triad theory is a relatively new theory of criminality that looks at the interplay of three psychosocial developmental processes (attachment, moral development, and identity-formation) in the development of a person's internal deterrence system during adolescence.

Biosocial criminology

Biosocial criminology is an interdisciplinary field that aims to explain crime and antisocial behavior by exploring both biological factors and environmental factors. While contemporary criminology has been dominated by sociological theories, biosocial criminology also recognizes the potential contributions of fields such as genetics, neuropsychology, and evolutionary psychology.[8] 

*

 
 
 
 
 
*
 
 
 

Predictive Value of Dreams - Outline of the working draft

Predictive Value of Dreams - Outline of the working draft


References and Links

Predictive Value of Dreams - Google Search

 
 
Apparent precognition of real events
According to surveys, it is common for people to feel their dreams are predicting subsequent life events.[84] Psychologists have explained these experiences in terms of memory biases, namely a selective memory for accurate predictions and distorted memory so that dreams are retrospectively fitted onto life experiences.[84] The multi-faceted nature of dreams makes it easy to find connections between dream content and real events.[85]
In one experiment, subjects were asked to write down their dreams in a diary. This prevented the selective memory effect, and the dreams no longer seemed accurate about the future.[86] Another experiment gave subjects a fake diary of a student with apparently precognitive dreams. This diary described events from the person's life, as well as some predictive dreams and some non-predictive dreams. When subjects were asked to recall the dreams they had read, they remembered more of the successful predictions than unsuccessful ones.[87]

*

Precognition - In dreams
 
Louisa Rhine at the Parapsychology Laboratory at Duke University compiled the best-known and largest body of dream evidence.[55] Dr. Rhine collected over 7000 accounts of ESP experiences. The majority of these accounts were dream related and were seemingly precognitive in nature. The material for this work was collected by advertisements in various well-known popular media.[56]
David Ryback, a psychologist in Atlanta, used a questionnaire survey approach to investigate precognitive dreaming in college students. His survey of over 433 participants showed that 290 or 66.9 percent reported some form of paranormal dream. He rejected many of these claims and reached a conclusion that 8.8 percent of the population was having actual precognitive dreams.[57]
An early inquiry into this phenomenon was done by Aristotle in his On Divination in Sleep. His criticism of these claims appeals to the fact that "the sender of such dreams should be God", and "the fact that those to whom he sends them are not the best and wisest, but merely commonplace persons." Thus: "Most [so-called prophetic] dreams are, however, to be classed as mere coincidences...", here "coincidence" being defined by Aristotle as that which does not take "place according to a universal or general rule" and referring to things which are not of themselves by necessity causally connected. His example being taking a walk during an eclipse, neither the walk nor the eclipse being apparently causally connected and so only by "coincidence" do they occur simultaneously.[58]
Other researchers in this area are more guarded in their reports on the value or use of dreams. In his book The Interpretation of Dreams, first published at the end of the 19th century, Sigmund Freud argued that the foundation of all dream content is the fulfillment of wishes, conscious or not and devoid of psychic content.[citation needed] On the other hand, Freud's view of precognition evolved. According to Jung, Freud's "materialistic prejudice" and "shallow positivism" lead him to reject the entire complex of questions relating to precognition and the occult as "nonsensical."[59] But years later, adds Jung, Freud both "recognized the seriousness of parapsychology and acknowledged the factuality of 'occult' phenomena."[60]
Dreams which appear to be precognitive may in fact be the result of the "Law of Large Numbers". Robert Todd Carroll, author of "The Skeptic's Dictionary" put it this way: "Say the odds are a million to one that when a person has a dream of an airplane crash, there is an airplane crash the next day. With 6 billion people having an average of 250 dream themes each per night, there should be about 1.5 million people a day who have dreams that seem clairvoyant."[61] 

*

precognition in dreams research - Google Search




precognition in dreams - Google Search



premonition dreams - Google Search




*

joseph dreams - Google Search


Friday, August 24, 2012

Anders Breivik's psychiatrist speaks to Channel 4 News Home Affairs Correspondent Simon Israel about how she found Breivik to be "a normal man with quite weird ideas".

Forensic psychiatrist: Breivik is not a monster

 
Friday 24 August 2012
Simon IsraelHome Affairs Correspondent
 
Simon Israel is a Home Affairs Correspondent for Channel 4 News 
 
Anders Breivik's psychiatrist speaks to Channel 4 News Home Affairs Correspondent Simon Israel about how she found Breivik to be "a normal man with quite weird ideas".
Average rating
0/5
Click to rate
The forensic psychiatrist employed by Norwegian's prison service rarely gives interviews.
In fact Dr Randi Rosenqvist has turned down all requests from the media in her own country. Yet she agreed to talk to me.
She's in demand because of one person: Anders Behring Breivik, Norway's most notorious mass murderer - the man who went on a killing spree on 22 July last year, the educated white 33-year old who first with a bomb and then with high powered rifles claimed 77 lives in total and injured 242 others.
Late last year she was asked to risk-assess this self-confessed right-wing anti-muslim extremist. She went in to Ila Prison in Olso not knowing anything of his mental health background.
She asssessed him as sane and as someone devoid of psychotic tendencies - someone who could survive isolation at least for the short-term.
He's not a monster. He's a well-behaved young man. Dr Randi Rosenqvist
Weird ideas
She visited him four times. Each time she came to the same conclusion. In her report to the court she wrote that Breivik found it 'funny' that he had been classified as a schizophrenic.
She told me: "He has not been insane in the last 7-8 months. Whether he was in July last year. I don't know. I found him a normal man with quite weird ideas, politically.
"I was quite surprised he seemed quite normal. He wanted to persuade me to accept his right-wing views but he was not rigid in his arguments.
"He didn't have this quality of psychotic delusions where you insist and insist and insist and where you are fixated and there is no possibility of changing one's opinion.
"Of course his ideas are not normal and he still insists what he did is right. He's not a monster. He's a well behaved young man."
Difficult diagnosis
Dr Rosenqvist has spent 30 years in forensic psychiatry and most of her work has been within Norway's prisons system. Her reports on her prisoners are confidential.
But her analysis of Breivik became public during his 10 week trial so she feels more free to talk. She says Breivik is not typical at all of either a sane offender or an insane offender. She accepts there it will difficult in diagnosing him.
She said what he's done is so monstrous so it's difficult to understand it. She has little interest in what sentence Breivik receives; her fascination is with how his case will redefine what is and is not legal insanity.
The longest-serving prisoner in Norway has been inside for 30 years. Anders Behring Breivik may well break that record. He has a suite of three cells, compensation for isolation. One he sleeps in, one he studies in and one he exercises in.
His only human contact is with prison and health staff, police and his lawyers. He is not allowed contact with any other inmate on the wing.
He has become the most expensive prisoner in Norway and will remain so for many years to come.

More on this story

 
 

Thursday, August 23, 2012

ON Friday a Norwegian court will hand down its verdict on Anders Behring Breivik

Op-Ed Contributors

In Norway, a New Model for Justice

 

  • Facebook
  • Twitter
  • Google+
  • E-mail
  • Share
  • Print
  • Reprints
Oslo
Opinion Twitter Logo.

Connect With Us on Twitter

For Op-Ed, follow @nytopinion and to hear from the editorial page editor, Andrew Rosenthal, follow @andyrNYT.
ON Friday a Norwegian court will hand down its verdict on Anders Behring Breivik, who, on July 22, 2011, detonated a bomb in central Oslo, killing eight people and wounding hundreds more, then drove to Utoya Island, where he shot and killed 69 participants in the Norwegian Labor Party’s youth camp.
The world’s attention is focused on whether the court will find Mr. Breivik guilty or criminally insane, and there has already been much debate about how the court handled the question of his sanity. But there is far more to it. Because it gave space to the story of each individual victim, allowed their families to express their loss and listened to the voices of the wounded, the Breivik trial provides a new model for justice in cases of terrorism and civilian mass murder.
It is true that, on one level, the trial is not just about the state of Mr. Breivik’s mind but forensic psychiatry itself. The trial featured two psychiatric reports, the first concluding that at the time of the crime Mr. Breivik was psychotic and delusional, the other that he was rational. The spectacle of two teams of psychiatrists brandishing the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders and its Norwegian equivalent, only to draw radically opposed conclusions, undermined many Norwegians’ faith in forensic psychiatry.
Less attention, however, has been paid to the court’s concern for the victims and their families. Before the trial began, the court named 174 lawyers, paid by the state, to protect the interests of the victims and their families during the criminal investigation and the trial.
The court heard 77 autopsy reports. Listening to the technical details of the bullet wounds and other causes of death of 77 human beings could be soul-numbing. Not in this case. After each report, the audience watched a photo of the victim, most often a teenager, and listened to a one-minute-long biography voicing his or her unfulfilled ambitions and dreams.
The court also allotted time to testimony from survivors, some with horrific injuries. We attended the trial during their testimonies, and to listen to the story of their pain and their efforts to continue their lives was indescribably moving. The effect was not just to establish in detail exactly what happened in Oslo and on Utoya, but to remind us that behind each number there is a human being.
On the last day of the trial, after summations by the prosecution and the defense, the court allowed five representatives of victims’ families and friends to express their loss. Some of them did so with such eloquence and power that the otherwise restrained audience (mostly victims and their families) applauded.
Such intense reminders of the human suffering and loss did not come at the expense of the defendant’s rights. At the opening of the trial Mr. Breivik was allowed to hold forth about his ideology, an amalgam of American right-wing propaganda and European anti-Muslim fascism and racism, for 73 minutes. He testified in court for over a week. He frequently corrected witnesses.
At the very end of the trial, he was even given the last word, haranguing the court for half an hour about the “deconstruction” of Norwegian ethnic purity at the hands of “cultural Marxists.” Mr. Breivik’s speeches in court were not broadcast, but they were transmitted live to local courthouses all over Norway and transcribed verbatim on several news Web sites.
The court took upon itself the task of bearing public witness for Norwegian society, and for history, to the truth of the Oslo bombing and the massacre at Utoya. By affirming the humanity of each victim, the court tried to satisfy a traumatized society’s thirst for truth and justice without denying the defendant’s right to a fair hearing.
The Breivik trial thus sought to provide a measure of restorative justice within the normal criminal court system. Unlike the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission, however, the trial did not aim for reconciliation but for acknowledgment of the human suffering caused by the atrocities.
In recent years, courts around the world have chosen different ways to deal with cases involving terrorism and mass murder. Military tribunals at Guantánamo Bay are often closed, or rely on secret evidence. In the case of Jared L. Loughner, the man who shot Representative Gabrielle Giffords, a plea bargain was considered preferable to a traumatizing trial.
The Breivik trial provides an example of the opposite point of view: that full acknowledgment of the truth of human suffering can have healing effects, for the victims and their families, and for a whole nation. That, even more than the verdict itself, should be the lasting legacy of this horrific event in Norway’s history.
Toril Moi and David L. Paletz are professors of literature and romance studies and of political science, respectively, at Duke University.

 

Saturday, August 18, 2012

Link: Oxford Textbook of Philosophy and Psychiatry download book ...

Oxford Textbook of Philosophy and Psychiatry download book ...: Book: Oxford Textbook of Philosophy and Psychiatry Author: Oxford University Press, USA Date: 2006 Pages: 912 Format: CHM Language: English ISBN10: 0198526954 Mental health research and care in the twenty first ...

Healthcare Hall Of Shame - via Crime on HuffingtonPost.com by on 8/17/12

Healthcare Hall Of Shame 



via Crime on HuffingtonPost.com by on 8/17/12
This story comes courtesy of California Watch.

By Christina Jewett

One Southern California man sent recruiters to pressure elderly people into accepting power wheelchairs so he could bill Medicare. A Los Angeles woman is accused of laundering millions of dollars in fraudulent Medicare payments through jewelry stores after ordering walkers and canes for dead people. And a crew in and around Sacramento billed Medicare for running blood tests on each other and paid patients $100 to come to clinics.
They are among California's players on the "most wanted" list of health fraud fugitives in the U.S. The list contains the names of about 170 people indicted in cases across the country.
Since the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services' Office of Inspector General started the program a year and a half ago, 18 have been arrested, including one woman picked up at San Francisco International Airport.
Donald White, a spokesman for the inspector general's office, said the most-wanted effort has gotten more people looking for suspects and even resulted in one Detroit man turning himself in.
"There are a lot of people who are really fed up with the fraudsters who drain money out of needed Medicare and Medicaid programs designed for some of the most vulnerable U.S. citizens," White said. "It shows how serious the Office of Inspector General is in catching criminals who steal."
White said authorities work with international law enforcers and are seeking fugitives linked to scams that total $400 million in fraudulent payments.
Several people from the Golden State are at large, including two who were on the most-wanted list when it was unveiled in February 2011.
They include Leonard Nwafor, who was convicted of health fraud by a jury in 2008 before fleeing. According to a sentencing memorandum in his case, Nwafor ran a company called Pacific City Medical Equipment in San Fernando.
One person who worked for Nwafor approached a blind man after he left church in Fresno, offering to get him a free power wheelchair, court records say. The man provided his Medicare number, and Nwafor drew up paperwork for the order. Three doctors testified in the case that their signatures on prescriptions for power wheelchairs were forged.
Nwafor's company paid the Fresno patient recruiter $100 for each reference he provided for other Medicare recipients who would take a wheelchair. Ultimately, Nwafor got more than $500,000 from Medicare for wheelchairs that people did not need and often did not get, court records say.
Nwafor faces nine years in federal prison if he is found.
Susan Bendigo is another Californian featured on the original most-wanted list. She is one of more than 40 people accused of running or taking part in a scheme that allegedly provided impostor nurses to Medi-Cal recipients of home health services.
According to court documents, Bendigo was director of nursing for a Sante Fe Springs company, Medcare Plus Home Health Providers. The firm claimed it provided home care nurses for disabled children.
The nurses, however, were not licensed professionals. Court records say Bendigo and other employees coached them to claim to be licensed vocational nurses, if asked.
Bendigo, who was born in the Philippines, was indicted in 2009 but has not entered a plea.
Also on the most-wanted list is Ekaterina Shlykova, who is accused of running a Los Angeles jewelry store that was used to launder $53 million in payments from Medicare for medical supplies. Many were ordered for dead people and for others who did not seek the supplies, authorities say.
Shlykova initially was arrested for driver's license perjury in August 2009 related to what appeared to be a far smaller Medicare fraud scheme. At that time, authorities believed she worked with two others to bilk Medicare of $678,000 by submitting phony bills for diabetic shoes, walkers, canes and wheelchairs.
Her $25,000 bail was met, and Shlykova was released from jail. Then authorities uncovered a far larger scam.
By October 2009, authorities discovered Shlykova had 99 checkbooks, 151 bank and credit card account numbers and several shell jewelry businesses throughout Los Angeles. An amended complaint against Shlykova accuses her of 67 counts of forgery, money laundering, grand theft, conspiracy and identity theft.
In January 2010, an additional charge was added: willful failure to appear in court. Court records say Shlykova, who also goes by Marina Sekinaeva, has 20 Armenian, Russian and Georgian passports.
Another California most-wanted suspect was picked up in March 2011 at San Francisco International Airport. Zoya Belov has since signed a guilty plea to charges of health care fraud after working at a clinic that recruited patients to receive care.
The plea was based on Belov's role in drawing blood from patients and performing electrocardiograms at a Sacramento clinic. Patients were brought to the clinic by a "capper," or driver, who was paid to recruit patients who, in turn, were paid $100 to visit the clinic.
Belov is a nurse who was licensed in Russia but not in the United States. Court records say that on at least one occasion, Belov took blood from a clinic employee and represented it as a patient's. The clinic sent $2.2 million in bills to Medicare and drew $586,000 in fraudulent payments, records show.
Belov is expected to be sentenced in November. Another member of the clinic team, Dr. Lana Le Chabrier of Santa Barbara, was sentenced in July to six and a half years in prison for health care fraud. She nearly made the most-wanted list, according to prosecutors: After charges were filed, she was seized on the Canadian border with $55,000 in cash and a bottle of hair dye.
Christina Jewett is an investigative reporter focusing on health and welfare for California Watch and the Center for Investigative Reporting. To read more California Watch stories, click here.

8/18/12 - News Review

8/18/12 - News Review

via Crime on HuffingtonPost.com by Religion News Service on 8/17/12
(RNS/ENInews) A Moscow court on Friday (Aug. 17) found three members of the feminist punk band Pussy Riot guilty of "hooliganism motivated by religious hatred" after a guerrilla performance in Moscow's main cathedral in February. They were sentenced to two years in a penal colony.

The band performed a "punk prayer" against Russian President Vladimir Putin and Russian Orthodox Patriarch Kirill I.

The case has divided Russia and the Orthodox Church and drawn worldwide protests on behalf of the band and free speech. Outside the courtroom, protesters clashed with police and well-known chess champion Garry Kasparov was arrested during the protests.

The charges against Nadezhda Tolokonnikova, Maria Alyokhina and Yekaterina Samutsevich had carried up to seven years in prison, and the prosecutor had demanded at least three years for the women, who range in age from 22 to 30.

Judge Maria Syrova said that she did not accept the defendants' explanation that Christ the Savior Cathedral is not a church but a commercial enterprise because of businesses that operate there.

During the trial, which began last month, the defendants explained that they were opposed to Kirill's support of Putin, who returned to the Kremlin after winning the March 4 presidential elections in the face of protests claiming voting irregularities.

Kirill has been silent on the case for several months after leading a prayer service in April to pray for deliverance from persecution of the church.

Archpriest Vsevolod Chaplin, spokesman for the Moscow Patriarchate, has said the church is ready to forgive members of Pussy Riot if they repent.

"If someone insults me personally, then of course I will forgive them," Chaplin told the RIA Novosti news agency last month. "But if someone insults my faith or my God, I wait until they change their position and admit that they acted wrongly."

In the performance, the musicians walked into the cathedral, donned brightly colored hoods and began to gesticulate and dance in front of the altar. Their actions were filmed as a video and set to music with the lyrics "O Birthgiver of God, Get Rid of Putin" and an expletive as a refrain.

The video went viral, shocking many Russians and infuriating the Kremlin and the Orthodox hierarchy, but also setting off a debate in the church about the role of forgiveness and mercy in Orthodoxy.

*


August 17, 2012
States are urged to aim for a temporary detention order period of 72 hours to allow a complete clinical evaluation after a patient’s mental health crisis.Abstract Teaser
August 17, 2012
Prisoners have the right to avoid punishment such as solitary confinement that can produce harmful psychological effects or exacerbate psychiatric conditions, APA tells Congress.Abstract Teaser
Legal News
Legal News

This post has been generated by Page2RSS


*

via Psychiatric Times on 8/16/12
Our exchanges be marked by basic respect and civility—and by a willingness to take personal responsibility for what we say and how we say it. Physicians ought to be in the vanguard of such an Internet reformation.


*

via Psychiatric News Alert by noreply@blogger.com (Psychiatric News Alert) on 8/17/12

“Attenuated psychosis syndrome” (APS)—a diagnostic category intended to describe individuals at very high risk for schizophrenia spectrum disorders but who have not yet had an acute psychotic break—will not be included as a diagnostic entity in the DSM-5. Instead it will be listed in a third section of the manual (following the introduction and the main text listing disorders) for proposed diagnostic criteria requiring “further study."

Inclusion of the diagnosis was favored by advocates of prevention who say individuals at very high risk of schizophrenia could be identified in the community. Others argued against inclusion, saying the field of prevention is not advanced enough to avoid diagnosing and possibly unnecessarily medicating adolescents with symptoms that may be transient and self-limiting.

Look for coverage of the decision in the September issue of Psychiatric News. For more information about the proposed category of attenuated psychosis syndrome, see Psychiatric News here.
(Image: Lightspring/shutterstock.com)
For previous news alerts, click here.

*


PsychCentral.com



Bipolar Patients with History of Pot Use Show Better Cognitive Skills
PsychCentral.com
Individuals with bipolar disorder who also have a history of marijuana use demonstrate advanced neurocogitive skills compared to bipolar patients with no history of use, according to research published online in the journal Psychiatry Research ...
Cannabis Enhances Bipolar Patients' Neurocognitive PerformanceMedical News Today
Study: Pot May Improve Cognitive Functioning in Bipolar DisorderThe Atlantic
Long-time Depression Linked to Bipolar DisorderdailyRx

all 4 news articles »

*

via Uploads by NIMHgov by NIMHgov on 8/17/12
Advances in neuroscience research may bring tough questions
From:NIMHgov
Views:5
0ratings
Time:03:48More inEducation

*

The folly of modern psychological analysis and diagnosis - posted in 2 - Epistemology: About two months ago I was researching modern psychological analysis and diagnosis and I was astonished at how many symptoms were neutral terms like selfish. ... Gender:Male; Location:Westerville, Ohio; Interests:Architecture, Physics, Philosophy, Music (Lionel Yu/musicalbasics on youtube, Bogdan Alin Ota, Karl Jenkins, Tchaikovsky, Vivaldi, Mozart, Rachmianoff, Chopin).

http://www.objectivistliving.com/forums/index.php?showtopic=12390

View PostMrBenjamatic, on 17 August 2012 - 11:19 AM, said:
About two months ago I was researching modern psychological analysis and diagnosis and I was astonished at how many symptoms were neutral terms like selfish. Anti-social personality disorder (or psychopathy) is a great example of this; symptoms of this folly disorder include selfishness, lack of guilt, grandeoise sense of self worth, the lack of acting on emotions (described as being emotionally shallow), lack of empathy and pity (lack of altruism). I'd like to highlight the 'grandeoise sense of self worth'. That is, essentially, arrogance. Arrogance pressuposes presumptuousness; an invalidly high opinion of oneself. But to call anyone with a high opinion of oneself arrogant is a wish to wipe out of existence all those whose high opinions of themselves are valid: Ayn Rand, Coco Chanel, Henry Bessemer, Frank Lloyd Wright. I could discuss the fallaciousness of the Anti-social personality disorder and other modern psychological diagnoses' for a while, but I won't. Does anyone know of any other follies in regards to modern psychological analysis (manic bipolar disorder is one of them I think)?

*

Feeding the illness industry machine thanks to DSM5 - National Post


National Post



Feeding the illness industry machine thanks to DSM5
National Post
Once again the armies of psychiatry are on the move, marching like imperial legions into unconquered territories of the human spirit. Psychiatrists do excellent work as individuals but when they join international bureaucracies they can cause trouble ...

and more »

Friday, August 17, 2012

Brazilian worker survives cranial drilling with huge bar (image: AP)-http://ow.ly/d3aY1

 Primera Hora
Obrero brasileño sobrevive a perforación craneal con enorme barra (Imagen: AP) - http://ow.ly/d3aY1
Brazilian worker survives cranial drilling with huge bar (image: AP)-http://ow.ly/d3aY1 (Translated by Bing)
 
 
 
 

Wednesday, August 15, 2012

UpToDate has added a new specialty, psychiatry

Carnegie-Vincent Library

We're here to help you – Information Literacy – Databases – Subject Guides
Image of Lincoln Reading

UpToDate has added a new specialty, psychiatry

UpToDate has added psychiatry to its list of specialties. Here is a blurb from UpToDate’s email announcement about this.
“Our Co-Editor-in-Chiefs of UpToDate in Psychiatry, Dr. Peter P. Roy-Byrne and Dr. Murray B. Stein, worked with a team of leading psychiatrists to build and expand our psychiatry content. Testing with psychiatrists showed that UpToDate answered their clinical questions 90% of the time.*
Content covers all the major areas of psychiatry — including psychotic disorders, depressive disorders, bipolar disorders, anxiety disorders, somatoform disorders, eating disorders, impulse control disorders, substance-use disorders and personality disorders.”

The Tangled Links Between Psychiatric Disorders and Creativity

The Tangled Links Between Psychiatric Disorders and Creativity:
The potential association of creativity with mental illness has generated both scientific interest and controversy since such a relationship was first posited by the ancient Greeks.

The two might...

Psychiatry’s Legitimacy Crisis

Wednesday, August 15, 2012

Psychiatry’s Legitimacy Crisis

All We Have to Fear: Psychiatry's Transformation of Natural Anxieties into Mental Disorders
by Allan V. Horwitz and Jerome C. Wakefield

Book Review by Andrew Scull
The Los Angeles Book Review
Originally published on August 8, 2012

ABOUT 40 YEARS AGO, American psychiatry faced an escalating crisis of legitimacy. All sorts of evidence suggested that, when confronted with a particular patient, psychiatrists could not reliably agree as to what, if anything, was wrong. To be sure, the diagnostic process in all areas of medicine is far more murky and prone to error than we like to think, but in psychiatry the situation was — and indeed still is — a great deal more fraught, and the murkiness more visible. It didn’t help that psychiatry’s most prominent members purported to treat illness with talk therapy and stressed the central importance of early childhood sexuality for adult psychopathology. In this already less-than-tidy context, the basic uncertainty regarding how to diagnose what was wrong with a patient was potentially explosively destabilizing.

The modern psychopharmacological revolution began in 1954 with the introduction of Thorazine, hailed as the first “anti-psychotic.” It was followed in short order by so-called “minor tranquilizers:” Miltown, and then drugs like Valium and Librium. The Rolling Stones famously sang of “mother’s little helper,” which enabled the bored housewife to get through to her “busy dying day.” Mother’s helper had a huge potential market. Drug companies, however, were faced with a problem. As each company sought its own magic potion, it encountered a roadblock of sorts: its psychiatric consultants were unable to deliver homogeneous populations of test subjects suffering from the same diagnosed illness in the same way. Without breaking the amorphous catchall of “mental disturbance” into defensible sub-sets, the drug companies could not develop the data they needed to acquire licenses to market the new drugs.

The entire story is here.

Perversion: A Lacanian Psychoanalytic ... - Routledge Mental Health

Perversion: A Lacanian Psychoanalytic ... - Routledge Mental Health: In Perversion, Stephanie Swales provides a close reading (a qualitative hermeneutic reading) of what Lacan said about perversion and its substructures (i.e., fetishism, voyeurism, exhibitionism, sadism, and masochism). ... allegedly less pejorative term 'paraphilia' in the psychiatric textbooks, most psychoanalysts continue to employ the term, and much in the same way as their fellow clinicians, notably as a synonym for transgressive and eccentric sexual behaviors.