In the 1950s, estimates of the incidence of depression were fifty people per million; today the estimate is 100,000 per million. What was once defined as “anxiety” and treated with tranquilizers in the wake of the crisis of benzodiazipine dependence and the development of selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors became “depression.” And as SSRIs have been shown to be effective for treating other nervous conditions, such as panic disorder, estimates of their frequency have increased markedly as well. Disease increasingly means whatever (...) we have a reimbursable treatment for. (shrink)

Motorcycle helmet laws are perceived to infringe upon individual rights even though they reduce mortality and health care costs. We describe proposed helmet legislation that protects individual rights and provides incentives for helmet use through a differential motorcycle registration fee that requires higher fees for those who wish to ride without a helmet.

When the University of Toronto withdrew a contract it held with me in December 2000, it initiated a sequence of events that led to a public letter to the University from senior figures in the world psychopharmacology community protesting against the infringement of academic freedom involved and a first ever legal action, undertaked by this author, seeking redress for a violation of academic freedom. The issues of academic freedom surrounding this case have been intertwined with a debate about the possibility (...) that the selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI) group of antidepressants have the potential to trigger suicidality in a subgroup of patients. Whether the SSRIs do trigger suicidality or not, exploration of this issue has given rise to a number of worrying sets of observations. First, in my view, there is evidence that pharmaceutical companies have miscoded raw data on suicidal acts and suicidal ideation. Second, this author also maintains that there is a growing body of examples of ghostwriting of articles in the therapeutics domain. Many of the tensions evident in this case, therefore, can be linked to company abilities to keep clinical trial data out of the public domain — this is the point at which the pharmaceutical python gets a grip on academia. (shrink)

The systematic funding of University research has brought into relief a question of conflicting interests. The potential in funded research for conflict and the damaging effects that conflicting interests might have on civil society had been first noted by Eisenhower in the context of State-funded research. Since the 1980s, there has been greater concern with the corrosive effects of private or corporate funding on research. Initial efforts to manage the problems have focused on authorship declarations, but recent controversies with the (...) SSRIs suggest the only way to manage the problem is by placing all clinical trial data in the public domain. (shrink)

It's sold as happiness in a blister pack - a cure-all that has changed the way we think about wellbeing. As Prozac reaches its 20th birthday, Anna Moore presents 20 things you need to know about the most widely used antidepressant in the world.

Few figures of the Middle Ages command the attention of so many modern disciplines as Robert Grosseteste (c. 1170-1253). Theology, Philosophy, History, and Science are all areas which his life and thought continue to have significance and to inspire re-interpretation. Accompanied by a series of original commentaries, this new edition of Grosseteste's work, with English translation, draws together the perspectives of modern scientists and medieval specialists. Volume I of a six volume series, Knowing and Speaking presents two of the earliest (...) of Grosseteste's works, the treatises On the Liberal Arts and On the Generation of Sounds. These are accompanied by a significant Middle English treatise on the Seven Liberal Arts whose anonymous fifteenth-century author translated and excerpted passages from Grosseteste's treatises in a re-imagining of their structure and function.0Each work is treated separately within the volume, which is constructed in three parts. On the Liberal Arts sets Grosseteste's thoughts on the arts subjects and emphasises moral concerns about the purpose of learning. On the Generation of Sounds builds on the theories and statements of On the Liberal Arts in connection to the production of sound, elaborating the earlier position, relating the generation of sounds to human vocal and speech production. (shrink)

First ever English Translation of Philippe PInel's 2nd Medico-Philosophical Treatise on Mental Alienation. The founder of French psychiatry wrote Medico-Philosophical Treatise on Mental Alienation in 1800 and reworked it nine years later. This book is the "Entirely Reworked and Extensively Expanded" version from 1809. Today, it can give historians of medicine and psychiatrists an overview of mental illnesses as they were viewed in that era. The author, Philippe Pinel, became known as the doctor who worked to free the insane from (...) chains. (shrink)

No discussion of academic freedom, research integrity, and patient safety could begin with a more disquieting pair of case studies than those of Nancy Olivieri and David Healy. The cumulative impact of the Olivieri and Healy affairs has caused serious self examination within the biomedical research community. The first part of the essay analyses these recent academic scandals. The two case studies are then placed in their historical context—that context being the transformation of the norms of science (...) through increasingly close ties between research universities and the corporate world. After a literature survey of the ways in which corporate sponsorship has biased the results of clinical drug trials, two different strategies to mitigate this problem are identified and assessed: a regulatory approach, which focuses on managing risks associated with industry funding of university research, and a more radical approach, the sequestration thesis, which counsels the outright elimination of corporate sponsorship. The reformist approach is criticised and the radical approach defended. (shrink)

Bioethics journals have lagged behind medical and science journals in exploring the threat of conflict of interest (COI) to the integrity of publications. Some recent discussions of COI that have occurred in the bioethics literature are reviewed. Discussions of what has been termed the ?Healy affair? unintentionally demonstrate that the direct and indirect influence of undisclosed COI may come from those who call for protection from the undue influence of industry. Paradoxically, the nature and tone of current discussions may (...) serve to dull sensitivities to what is indeed a serious set of issues facing bioethics. Some proposals are presented to address COI and other challenges to the integrity of bioethics and its journals. COI is too important a topic to be left to ideologues, and there is no substitute for readers' caution and skepticism as tools in dealing with the full range of biases that exist in published papers. (shrink)

Part of the appeal of the biological approach to personal identity is that it does not have to countenance spatially coincident entities. But if the termination thesis is correct and the organism ceases to exist at death, then it appears that the corpse is a dead body that earlier was a living body and distinct from but spatially coincident with the organism. If the organism is identified with the body, then the unwelcome spatial coincidence could perhaps be avoided. It is (...) argued that such an identification would be a mistake. A living organism has a different part/whole relationship and persistence conditions than the alleged body. A case will be made that the concept ‘human body’ is a conceptual mess, vague in an unprincipled manner, and that an eliminativist stance towards dead bodies is the appropriate response. CiteULike Connotea Del.icio.us What's this? (shrink)

Contemporary social-scientific research seeks to identify specific causal mechanisms for outcomes of theoretical interest. Experiments that randomize populations to treatment and control conditions are the “gold standard” for causal inference. We identify, describe, and analyze the problem posed by transformative treatments. Such treatments radically change treated individuals in a way that creates a mismatch in populations, but this mismatch is not empirically detectable at the level of counterfactual dependence. In such cases, the identification of causal pathways is underdetermined in a (...) previously unrecognized way. Moreover, if the treatment is indeed transformative it breaks the inferential structure of the experimental design. Transformative treatments are not curiosities or “corner cases,” but are plausible mechanisms in a large class of events of theoretical interest, particularly ones where deliberate randomization is impractical and quasi-experimental designs are sought instead. They cast long-running debates about treatment and selection effects in a new light, and raise new methodological challenges. (shrink)

As a continuation of the work of the third author in [5], we make further observations on the features of Galois cohomology in the general model theoretic context. We make explicit the connection between forms of definable groups and first cohomology sets with coefficients in a suitable automorphism group. We then use a method of twisting cohomology (inspired by Serre’s algebraic twisting) to describe arbitrary fibres in cohomology sequences—yielding a useful “finiteness” result on cohomology sets. Applied to the special case (...) of differential fields and Kolchin’s constrained cohomology, we complete results from [3] by proving that the first constrained cohomology set of a differential algebraic group over a bounded, differentially large, field is countable. (shrink)

There is a strong need to connect agricultural research to social movements and community-based food system reform efforts. Participatory research methods are a powerful tool, increasingly used to give voice to communities overlooked by academia or marginalized in the broader food system. Plant breeding, as a field of research and practice, is uniquely well-suited to participatory project designs, since the basic process of observing and selecting plants for desirable traits is accessible to participants without formal plant breeding training. The challenge (...) for plant breeders engaged in participatory research is to consider not only how their work incorporates farmer input in developing new varieties, but also how it interacts with broader questions of food sovereignty, food justice, diversity and democratization in the food system. This article examines these issues in the context of the Seed to Kitchen Collaborative, a participatory variety evaluation and breeding project at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. (shrink)

Setting goals in the workplace can motivate improved performance but it might also compromise ethical behavior. In this paper, we propose that individual differences in the dispositional tendency to morally justify behavior moderate the effects of specific performance goals on unethical behavior. We conducted an experimental study in which working participants, who were randomly assigned to a specific goal condition or to a condition with a vague goal that lacked a specific target, completed two tasks in which they had the (...) opportunity to act unethically. In an ethical dilemma task, participants in the specific goal condition were more likely to advocate using unethical methods. However, in an anagram task, only those with high moral justification overstated their performance to a greater degree in the specific goal condition. As such, individuals may not be equally susceptible to the ‘dark side’ of goal-setting. (shrink)

The Health (Regulation of Termination of Pregnancy) Act 2018 was commenced on 01/01/2019 in Ireland. The Act provides for legal termination of pregnancy under defined circumstances including for any reason at < 12 weeks gestation; and where two doctors agree there is ‘a condition affecting the foetus that is likely to lead to the death of the foetus either before, or within 28 days of, birth’. As such, abortion for congenital anomaly (CA) can occur at a number of time points, (...) depending on the adjudged severity. Infants born with CAs frequently require significant medical intervention and account for a high proportion of admissions to paediatric intensive care units (PICUs). The purpose of this paper was to evaluate the number of infants with CAs admitted to an Irish PICU in the period before and after the implementation of the Act. All PICU admissions < 1 month of age to a single Irish paediatric hospital between 2012 and 2021 were analysed. CAs were recorded, and the periods before and after the commencement of the Act compared. We found a difference in admissions involving CAs, particularly those related to congenital heart disease involving single ventricle anatomy. It is plausible that this difference was as a result of improved access to abortion services following the implementation of the Act. This article explores the legal conditions related to the abortion of a foetus with a CA in Ireland, and the possible impact of the Independent Review of the Operation of the Health ( Regulation of Termination of Pregnancy) Act 2018. (shrink)

This piece comprises short presentations given by contributors to a symposium organized by the journal Ethics & Social Welfare on the theme of global ethics for social work. The contributors offer their reflections on the extent to which universally accepted international statements of ethical principles in social work are possible or useful, engaging with debates about cultural diversity, relativism and the relevance of human rights in non-Western countries.

Upon what kind of moral order does capitalism rest? Conversely, does the market give rise to a distinctive set of beliefs, habits, and social bonds? These questions are certainly as old as social science itself. In this review, we evaluate how today's scholarship approaches the relationship between markets and the moral order. We begin with Hirschman's characterization of the three rival views of the market as civilizing, destructive, or feeble in its effects on society. We review recent work at the (...) intersection of sociology, economics, and political economy and show that these views persist both as theories of market society and moral arguments about it. We then argue that a fourth view, which we call moralized markets, has become increasingly prominent in economic sociology. This line of research sees markets as cultural phenomena and moral projects in their own right, and seeks to study the mechanisms and techniques by which such projects are realized in practice. (shrink)

In this innovative study, Lea David critically investigates the relationship between human rights and memory, suggesting that, instead of understanding human rights in a normative fashion, human rights should be treated as an ideology. Conceptualizing human rights as an ideology gives us useful theoretical and methodological tools to recognize the real impact human rights has on the ground. David traces the rise of the global phenomenon that is the human rights memorialization agenda, termed 'Moral Remembrance', and explores what (...) happens once this agenda becomes implemented. Based on evidence from the Western Balkans and Israel/Palestine, she argues that the human rights memorialization agenda does not lead to a better appreciation of human rights but, contrary to what would be expected, it merely serves to strengthen national sentiments, divisions and animosities along ethnic lines, and leads to the new forms of societal inequalities that are closely connected to different forms of corruptions. (shrink)

Liberal thinkers of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were alert to the political costs and human cruelties involved in European colonialism, but they also thought that European expansion held out progressive possibilities. In Progress, Pluralism, and Politics David Williams examines the colonial and anti-colonial arguments of Adam Smith, Immanuel Kant, Jeremy Bentham, and L.T. Hobhouse. Williams locates their ambivalent attitude towards European conquest and colonial rule in a set of tensions between the impact of colonialism on European states, the (...) possibilities of progress in distant and diverse places, and the relationship between universalism and cultural pluralism. In so doing he reveals some of the central ambiguities that characterize the ways that liberal thought has dealt with the reality of an illiberal world. Of particular importance are appeals to various forms of universal history, attempts to mediate between the claims of identity and the reality of difference, and the different ways of thinking about the achievement of liberal goods in other places. Pointing to key elements in still ongoing debates within liberal states about how they should relate to illiberal places, Progress, Pluralism, and Politics enriches the discussion on political thought and the relationship between liberalism and colonialism. (shrink)

Thus, Meyers provides a valuable account, not only of current medical attitudes, but also of relevant case and statute law as it stands at present.