Category: Mental Health
Managing tail risk in psychiatry – collaborative mapping
Too often in psychiatry we are faced with the problem of tail risk. The basic idea is ‘low probability high impact‘ events. This commonly presents among relatively stable patients in contrast to patients in an acute phase of disturbance. Some patients may have an established pattern of only one or two short-lived periods of disturbance per year where they present risks of suicide, homicide or violence, or arson. In any of those short-lived blips it is possible that serious harmRead More …
Untangling a confused mess: motives and psychopathy
Who is a psychopath? The short answer to is NOBODY. How shocking will that appear to the general public who are programmed by social media, BigMedia and popular psychology websites? To learn more, you’d have to study from the facts and my reasoned opinions below. At first I will spend a few minutes demolishing the nonsense spouted by Raj Persaud. Then I will move into the concepts of motives, psychopath and psychopathy. I am not here to diagnose or psychoanalyseRead More …
What exactly is support?
Over the years I have come to appreciate that patients in psychiatric services very much value support. I’ve been wondering ‘What does support mean?‘ Hold on – I know that everybody knows support when they feel it. That would not inform me what aspects of support make it real or valid. Mental health workers and services without doubt need to provide support. Support can vary across various types of activities e.g. emotional support, advice, guidance, therapy etc. That does notRead More …
Surgical and psychiatric malpractice compared
As a result of recent media publicity about surgeon’s performance, I began thinking that I rarely if ever see any stories in the media about psychological harm caused by failures in psychiatric treatments. I reflected on this and thought, that with surgery it is easier to spot errors in retrospect because patients can be subject to x-rays, scans and other tests to show physical things that went wrong procedurally. But in psychiatry where we use medications (or occasionally ECT), thereRead More …