Latest articles of note:
- Review doctor’s work again — Boston Globe — IF THE medical care given to 4-year-old Rebecca Riley appears appropriate to the state panel that oversees doctors, that panel needs to take a new look at the case. Rebecca was the victim of one of the most appalling child abuse cases in recent memory; in December 2006, she died on her parents’ bedroom floor of an overdose of powerful psychotropic drugs. They had been prescribed by Dr. Kiyoko Kifuji, a child psychiatrist at Tufts Medical Center, who relayed details of her treatment on the witness stand during the murder trials of Rebecca’s parents. Kifuji’s testimony — given under immunity — was so disturbing and seemingly cavalier that Plymouth District Attorney Timothy Cruz has asked the state Board of Registration of Medicine to reopen its review of her license. “If what Dr. Kifuji did in this case is the acceptable standard of care for children in Massachusetts,’’ Cruz said, “then there is something very wrong in this state.’’ He’s right.
- Black and White: The zebra effect — A journey–…just becoming aware of how I was using labels in my language was the first step to being able to use my language to choose to consciously create the change in my life that would set me free from that place of “black and white” thinking and begin to see the color in my world.
- Transgender Workplace Diversity: The DSM Diagnosis and The Workplace — As a professor of law, specializing in workplace law and policy, I often consult with business organizations where employees are undergoing gender transition. One question that frequently comes up is whether transgender employees are mentally ill, given that the American Psychiatric Association still includes “gender identity disorder” (but not homosexuality). Some express concern that transgender co-workers will pose a sexual danger in the workplace. While I explain that there is no need to fear such a result based on my research with many hundreds of companies, I have difficulty explaining away the diagnosis. Can you provide a better explanation for the presence of “gender identity disorder” in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of the American Psychiatric Association?
- MDRI Releases Report on Rotenberg Center – Spit, Bristle and Fury — Mental Disability Right Internation (MDRI) whose simple slogan is “Disability rights are human rights” has issued a report on the abuses at Judge Rotenberg Center calling on the Special Rappoteur, The Obama Administration and the Department of justice in their effort to put a stop to the establishment’s longstanding abuses against children and adults in their alleged “care”. You may remember my posting about JRC in the past. The abuses that occur there are astounding and I and many others are left wondering how such abuses can carry on without any outside interference from the governing bodies that are supposed to protect all of our citizens — certainly those among us most vulnerable to mistreatment. In its report MDRI rightfully calls this mistreatment nothing short of torture.