Thank you Dr. Pope for the summary. -------- Forwarded Message -------- The new issue of The Lancet includes an article: “Kay Redfield Jamison: healing in mind” by Niall Boyce. Here are some excerpts: Figure thumbnail fx1 I am talking on Zoom with Kay Redfield Jamison, Co-Director of the Mood Disorders Center and Professor of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, Baltimore, MD, USA, about her new book Fires in the Dark: Healing the Unquiet Mind. Its optimistic title is belied by the dustjacket photograph depicting flames rising from Notre Dame cathedral during the 2019 fire. While pointing out that she does not choose her cover art, Jamison nevertheless thinks it is an appropriate image: “Since I wrote about Notre Dame, and what it is that you can bring from ruin and destruction, it has some meaning there.” The book's title, meanwhile, is taken from English writer Siegfried Sassoon's poem To a Very Wise Man, a tribute to W H R Rivers, the psychiatrist who helped him cope with trauma sustained in World War 1. Fires in the Dark is the latest in a series of highly regarded publications by Jamison; previous topics include creativity and mental illness, suicide, bereavement, and exuberance. The book is concerned with healing, and Jamison has in her life been both the healer and the healed; her experience of bipolar disorder was the subject of her 1995 memoir An Unquiet Mind. Fires in the Dark is a book about finding a way forward, but it is also a revisitation of Jamison's past, as its subtitle suggests. Jamison recalls an episode of depression that she had as a 17-year-old in California during the 1960s, when help came not from a psychiatrist, but from an English teacher: “Nobody talked about depression. I mean, it just wasn’t done…But he came to me with a couple of volumes by Robert Lowell, and Sherston's Progress by Sassoon, and The Once and Future King by T H White.” Jamison tells me that these books—poetry, fictionalised war memoir, and Arthurian legend—“have just stayed in my life since”. There is an epic quality to Jamison's own life; her early years were spent moving “from Florida to California to Puerto Rico, Japan, Washington” with her family—her father was a scientist and pilot with the US Air Force. “I actually loved it, and enjoyed meeting new people”, she says. Settling in Pacific Palisades, CA, USA, when her father took a job with the RAND Corporation, Jamison's thoughts turned to the medical world; psychology, she explains, came later. At one point, she was set to become a veterinarian; and yet, discussing this stage in her life, I detect a hint of where her talents would eventually lead her. Animals, Jamison says, are “different, they go through the same world [as humans] and they sense that differently”. Perhaps this interest in communication across seemingly insuperable barriers meant that her eventual qualification in clinical psychology was on the cards from the start? One of the most frustrating things about mental illness, Jamison tells me, “is that you can’t communicate in your normal way. So it's up to the therapist…How do you find out what someone is feeling and thinking when they’re so ill, and so embarrassed about being ill?” Jamison has tackled that stigma in her own life, making public her experience of bipolar disorder in An Unquiet Mind. While family and colleagues were largely supportive, she experienced a ferocious backlash from some quarters. “I got a lot of hate mail”, Jamison recalls. “A lot of people saying it's a good thing you didn’t have children [and] pass these genes on.” But it was vital to Jamison to tell her story, other people's accounts of their illness having proved invaluable to her: “When I got manic the first time, I was so terrified…everything was just bleak, bleak. The fact that people had gotten through it was very meaningful, very important.” In a field that is often marked by professional polarisation, Jamison takes a holistic attitude towards healing: “I think psychotherapy is so undervalued. And I think there's no question in my own mind that for myself, psychotherapy kept me as alive as lithium did.” <snip> We return to the subject of Rivers, one of the key psychological and societal healers featured in Fires in the Dark. Jamison tells me that it was said “that he came by understanding human nature probably through more different paths than anyone else. Through experimental psychology, anthropology, neurology, psychiatry, medical psychology…there's profundity there of wisdom; of human wisdom, and an openness to experience, and a compassion toward suffering.” I’m struck that Jamison takes a similarly expansive approach: she is focused not only on the acute stages of mental health problems, but also on what comes afterwards: “if you’ve got to spend the rest of your life knowing that you’ve got a recurrent illness—that you may get sick at any time, under the best of circumstances—you’ve got to figure out what you’re going to do with that. And to me…healing is a lot of getting well enough and insightful enough to say: How do I take on the world? How do I take some purpose from this?” Although the US health-care system—which Jamison describes as “utterly completely broken”—does not make it easy for clinicians to work as healers, she remains optimistic. Towards the end of our conversation, I ask her about her statement in An Unquiet Mind that she “long ago abandoned the notion of a life without storms”. Is this still the case? “I’ve been very lucky”, she replies. “By medical standards, I have a bad version of bipolar illness, but by treatment standards, I have a very good response.” She looks thoughtful. “The idea that there are storms out there doesn’t bother me.” Ken Pope Ken Pope, Nayeli Y. Chavez-Dueñas, Hector Y. Adames, Janet L. Sonne, and Beverly A. Greene Speaking the Unspoken: Breaking the Silence, Myths, and Taboos That Hurt Therapists and Patients (APA, 2023) “I am not afraid of storms, for I am learning how to sail my ship.” —Jo March in Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women (1868)
Thank you Dr. Pope for this summary: -------- Forwarded Message -------- Inside Higher Education includes an article: “‘Teaching on Eggshells’: Students Report Professors’ Offensive Comments A recent survey shows about 75 percent of students would report professors for saying something they find offensive.” Here are some excerpts: Students sit in a lecture hall facing the instructor at the front of the room Students are increasingly taking offense to comments by professors and peers. Nearly three-quarters of all college students, regardless of their political affiliation, believe professors who make comments the students find offensive should be reported to the university, according to a new report. A similar rate of students would also report their peers for making insulting or hurtful remarks. The report by the Sheila and Robert Challey Institute for Global Innovation and Growth at North Dakota State University is based on a survey of 2,250 students from 131 public and private four-year institutions across the country and was released Wednesday. Over all, the percentage of students who said they would report a professor was higher among self-identified liberal students (81 percent) than among self-identified conservative students (53 percent). Sixty-six percent of liberal students and 37 percent of conservative students said they would also report peers who made offensive comments. John Bitzan, author of the report, said the survey findings are troubling and reflect continuing challenges on college campuses to encourage students to think critically and engage in healthy debates—with each other and with faculty members—over issues on which they disagree. “Of any place, a university should be a place that is open to a variety of points of view, and traditionally the universities have been,” said Bitzan, who is also director of the institute and a professor of management. “To me, it’s alarming that students are saying, ‘You can’t have an opinion on something that differs from the correct or appropriate opinion without being reported to the university.’” <snip> In an attempt to identify exactly what kind of statements by professors students would report—be they opinions with which students disagree, or strictly racial slurs, sexual harassment or personal attacks—the survey provided 10 examples of comments the students would report as offensive. The options included “It is clear that affirmative action is doing more harm than good and should be eliminated” and “A civilized society doesn’t need guns.” Sean Stevens, director of polling and analytics at the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, a campus civil liberties watchdog group, said in his view most of the statements prompted would be “very reasonable statements to make.” He said several of the example statements, while potentially controversial, are supported by data, have been published in peer-reviewed literature or have been debated and ruled upon in court. Others may reflect more of a professor’s personal opinion but are opinions held by “plenty of people.” “I don’t think any of those are necessarily that unreasonable, albeit they may be offensive to some people,” Stevens said. The likelihood of reporting instructors was higher among conservative students when the statements provided were liberal-leaning and higher among liberal students when the statements were conservative-leaning. The findings on students’ likelihood to report offensive comments were part of a larger annual survey assessing student perceptions about campus culture and viewpoint diversity. About 60 percent of the students surveyed identified as liberal and 20 percent conservative, according to the report. These demographics are similar to those represented in a national analysis of free speech on college campuses by FIRE. Stevens, director of polling at FIRE, said the survey findings on students’ level of comfort speaking on campus about controversial subjects are similar to results FIRE has seen in its student polls since 2020. He noted that FIRE has seen even lower rates of comfort, likely because its polls specifically asked students about their comfort discussing “controversial political topics.” Although the survey questions were written and analyzed by Bitzan and the Challey Institute—a conservative-leaning interdisciplinary institute housed in North Dakota State’s College of Business—the poll was conducted by an independent survey group, College Pulse, in May and June. Its margin of error was plus or minus 2.4 percentage points. <snip> “I’m very confident that the results are accurate,” Bitzan said. “I do think that there are definitely differences between the way liberal students and conservative students view the campus climate in terms of openness to different points of view.” Some of the poll answers suggest that a majority of students perceive their campuses as being generally open to the sharing of controversial or unpopular ideas. About 70 percent say they feel at least somewhat comfortable sharing their opinions on a sensitive topic. But of the students who felt at least somewhat comfortable with the campus climate, about half said it was because they believe their views align with most other students’ and professors’. “They say the campus climate is open to a variety of points of view,” Bitzan said of students surveyed. “But it could be a signal of, ‘I think that the campus climate agrees with my point of view. If there’s something that I view as unacceptable, or not aligning with my point of view, then I’m not tolerant of that.’” “Students are saying you can’t have an opinion on something that differs from the correct or appropriate opinion without being reported to the university.” Stevens, director of polling at FIRE, said the survey findings on students’ level of comfort speaking on campus about controversial subjects are similar to results FIRE has found in its student polls since 2020. He noted that the reported rates of comfort were likely even lower because students were specifically asked about discussing “controversial political topics.” Jonathan Friedman, director of the free expression and education programs at PEN America, a free speech advocacy group, said the survey results align with what he’s heard is happening on many campuses across the country. The frequency with which students are reporting professors “is scaling up in a way that universities haven’t really dealt with before.” Institutions lack “good, clear processes or apparatuses” to receive, process and investigate the reports, Friedman said, and as a result many faculty often feel like they’re “teaching on eggshells.” “You do have to do some work to explain to students what might meet the bar for being reported, teaching some of the distinctions between speech that offends versus speech that harms, or the difference between disagreement and discrimination,” he added. Ken Pope Ken Pope, Nayeli Y. Chavez-Dueñas, Hector Y. Adames, Janet L. Sonne, and Beverly A. Greene Speaking the Unspoken: Breaking the Silence, Myths, and Taboos That Hurt Therapists and Patients (APA, 2023) “What is freedom of expression? Without the freedom to offend, it ceases to exist.” ― Salman Rushdie
https://healthitsecurity.com/news/security-flaws-found-in-software-development-kit-used-for-telemedicine-services July 12, 2023 by Jill McKeon Claroty’s Team82 and Check Point Research (CPR) discovered critical vulnerabilities in the QuickBlox software development kit (SDK) and application programming interface (API), a framework that...
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Email2Lemmy ROBOT -- CHECK ACTUAL AUTHOR BELOW: EMAIL LIST: https://www.clinicians-exchange.org & MASTODON: https://mastodon.clinicians-exchange.org . TITLE: The First Over-the-Counter Birth-Control Pills Have Been Approved https://www.wsj.com/articles/birth-control-pill-over-the-counter-d1786ef2?st=rlq85shh6a4ztnl&reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink https://www.wsj.com/articles/house-gop-threatens-to-derail-defense-bill-over-abortion-transgender-care-1c7dfe7a?st=amnk087aakvyzj6&reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink #psychology #counseling #socialwork #psychotherapy @psychotherapist @psychotherapists @psychology @socialpsych @socialwork @psychiatry #mentalhealth #psychiatry #healthcare #depression #pill #reproductiverights #birthcontrol #women #reproductivefreedom
Email2Lemmy ROBOT -- CHECK ACTUAL AUTHOR BELOW: EMAIL LIST: https://www.clinicians-exchange.org & MASTODON: https://mastodon.clinicians-exchange.org TITLE: Imposter Syndrome ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ A few months ago someone posted an inquiry about imposter syndrome. This article posted today: https://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/994344?ecd=wnl_dne6_230714_MSCPEDIT_etid5638673&uac=397605ET&impID=5638673 ~~~~ #psychology #counseling #socialwork #psychotherapy @psychotherapist @psychotherapists @psychology @socialpsych @socialwork @psychiatry #mentalhealth #psychiatry #healthcare #imposter #impostersyndrome #doctor #doctors