I recently wrote a piece about why I believed that police officers should receive ongoing mental health counselling to help them manage the stress they unavoidably experience on the job. I argued that poor stress management can lead to too many mistakes in the field, but I would like to give one example to illustrate this point.
The greatest threat to a police officer’s life and safety is not the armed and violent offender which he/she might encounter in the course of their duties. It is the person who looks back at them from the mirror when they brush their teeth.
Medical professionals respect their patients’ values, but they do not always respect medical decisions which they have strong reason to believe are based on being misinformed. This standard of care is not perfect, but it saves many lives, and there is no logical reason why the same treatment standards applied to other patients could not also be applied to psychiatric patients.
If we value the lives of our fellow citizens who are suffering from debilitating brain illnesses, we will spend what we need to spend in order to protect them and help them get well.
My (now retired) boat captain brother in law earned the name Hurricane Harry after his charter cruise was rescued by a Russian freighter off the coast of Florida during one of the season’s unpredictable storms. When he had left the port at Miami, a hurricane had been detected by radar, but it was far offshore and was predicted to make landfall north of the state […]
There is a long overdue debate currently going on in the pages of the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) over whether the separation of Neurology and Psychiatry into two separate disciplines still makes any sense.
The past few weeks have been rather stressful, to say the least. And while normally you could just destress by spending some time with your friends or loved ones, this just isn’t quite possible, and you’re forced to deal with this by yourself for now.
It is hard living a successful life while coping with racism in America. African Americans must constantly monitor their own behavior whenever they are in public, knowing that the most innocent action might be interpreted as a threat and result in the police being called, or worse.
There are many studies that have been conducted and they all indicate that hallucinations in the elderly are quite common than in any other age group. There is also a lot of stigmas that are associated with hallucinations and it so happens that many people don’t report when it happens. Some facts about hallucinations are […]
There is an argument being made by some for “reopening the economy” regardless, of the number of Americans who may die from COVID-19 if social distancing measures are relaxed before the spread of the disease can be contained by testing and quarantining the infected.
