Forensic psychiatrists need to be familiar with the use of posttraumatic stress disorder as a legitimate and proper defense in criminal cases, especially given changes to its classification in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders.
A new Virginia law governing collaborations between nurse practitioners and doctors leaves unresolved key legal issues in team-based care, including those pertaining to medical malpractice and liability and anticompetitive practices.
Movements to deinstitutionalize people with mental illness and to make institutionalization more legally difficult have resulted in a lack of space and resources for the care of those with severe mental illness, and many have ended up in jails and prisons.
When a patient requests an unfamiliar treatment, the physician should not hesitate to research it before giving a categorical reply about its safety or efficacy.
Registries of those considered dangerous focus wrongly on those with mental illness, who account for only 4 percent of violent acts committed in the United States.
Jessie Kimbrough-Sugick, MD, MPH, Jessica Holzer, MA, and Eric B. Bass, MD, MPH
Researchers who approach community partners with an agenda already in hand are missing the point of the community-based participatory research enterprise: developing priorities for study together.
A year after Hurricane Katrina, Dr. Pou was arrested and charged with one count of second-degree murder and nine counts of conspiracy to commit second-degree murder for administering drugs to patients who subsequently died.