Psychiatry

Shock therapy under fire in Massachusetts

Michael Cook | 12 May 2012

A controversy has erupted in Massachusetts over the use of skin shock therapy for troubled teenagers. The Judge Rotenberg Educational Center in the suburb of Canton is a facility for people with severe emotional, behavioural and psychiatric problems, including autism. It is the only institution in the US which uses shock therapy ...

Psychiatrists slate law to seek children’s consent

Jared Yee | 17 March 2012

Psychiatrists have criticised draft West Australian laws that would require mentally ill children as young as 12 to consent to sterilisation, electroconvulsive therapy and psychosurgery.

DSM-5 criticised for over-medicalising “normal behaviour”

Jared Yee | 17 February 2012

Hundreds of thousands of people could be diagnosed as “mentally ill” because they display behaviours now considered normal, in a revised edition of the psychiatrists’ bible, some experts warn.

Call for head of US bioethics commission to step down

Jared Yee | 14 July 2011

Corporate governance and management oversight are flavour of the week with the shenanigans at Rupert Murdoch’s defunct News of the World on every front page.

US psychiatrists accused of unethical treatment of prisoners

Jared Yee | 25 March 2011

Human rights group criticises US government about Bradley Manning

Chinese psychiatric hospitals used to incarcerate political opponents

Michael Cook | 28 June 2010

Situation gets worse with financial pressures on hospitals