Internet and Psychiatry

Wynn R, Kvalvik AM, Hynnekleiv T.
Nord J Psychiatry. 2011 Apr;65(2):133-7.

BACKGROUND: Many countries allow for the use of restraint and seclusion in emergencies with psychiatric inpatients. Authors have suggested that the attitudes of staff are of importance to the use of restraint and seclusion.

AIM: To examine the attitudes to coercion at two Norwegian psychiatric units. In contrast to the idea that attitudes to coercion vary much within and between institutions, we hypothesized that staff's attitudes would be quite similar.

Newton-Howes G, Mullen R.
Psychiatr Serv. 2011 May;62(5):465-70.

OBJECTIVE: This study systematically examined the empirical literature on the themes and correlates of coercion as defined by the subjective experience of patients in psychiatric care.
METHODS: The study was a systematic review of the literature on coercion as covered in MEDLINE, PsycINFO, and CINAHL. From qualitative studies, themes that the authors identified were extracted. From quantitative studies, correlational and outcome data were extracted.

Thiel MJ.
J Int Bioethique. 2010 Sep;21(3):51-62, 88-9.

Is human dignity an intrinsic value? Or is it a relative value, depending on the perception or assessment of quality of life? History had delineated some of its key features, but the advent of human rights and the Holocaust put special emphasis on this notion, particularly in the field of bioethics. But if modern medicine regards human dignity as crucial, it tends to support this notion while assessing and measuring it. The quality of life becomes the gauge for measuring human dignity, starting from a distinction between a viable and a non-viable existence, which may eventually lead to assisted death, or to letting die.

McBrearty P.
Int Emerg Nurs. 2011 Jan;19(1):20-6.

The focus of this research study was to ascertain the impact of crime on individuals, who presented with an injury to the emergency department. Given the high prevalence of crime in our society today, victims of crime are identified as a growing patient population seeking help in emergency departments. To maximise holistic care for these patients it is important that healthcare professionals gain insight into the experience of being a victim of crime. The study was qualitative in nature and used a phenomenological approach. In-depth, unstructured audio taped interviews were conducted to elicit the essence of the experience of being a victim of crime.

Wiesemann C.
J Med Ethics. 2011 Mar 1. [Epub ahead of print]

The paper discusses the current medical practice of 'gender verification' in sports from an ethical point of view. It takes the recent public discussion about 800m runner Caster Semenya as a starting point. At the World Championships in Athletics 2009 in Berlin, Germany, Semenya was challenged by competitors as being a so called 'sex impostor'. A medical examination to verify her sex ensued. The author analyses whether athletes like Semenya could claim a right not to know that is generally acknowledged in human genetics and enforced by international and national genetic privacy laws. The relevance of this right for genetic diagnosis in sports is discussed.

Issues Law Med. 2010 Fall;26(2):91-195.

This article completes a study that the author foreshadowed in his previous articles. The Western moral theory that defends the inalienable right to life and liberty--and that therefore forbids all forms of suicide and slavery--is now well known to the author's readers. What is not well known is an answer to the question of whether this theory, in its totality, was part of the original intent of the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution of the United States. The theory of the inalienable right to life and liberty was supported by many political philosophers in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Those philosophers and their theory did shape a good deal of the thought of the men who made the Thirteenth Amendment a part of the Constitution. The anti-suicide implication of the theory, however, was not present in the minds of the framers and ratifiers of the Thirteenth Amendment, and therefore was not part of their intent.