Charles Inglis McLaren (1882–1957) was a psychiatrist and missionary from the Presbyterian Church of Australia, and helped to introduce psychiatry to Korea. McLaren’s contributions to Korea extended beyond the mere introduction of a discipline, and were largely due to his uniqueness. McLaren was not only a psychiatrist, but also a thinker who thought deeply about Christianity, psychiatry, and t...

In 1986 Nadean Cool, a nurse's aide in Wisconsin sought therapy from a psychiatrist to help her cope with her reaction to a traumatic event experienced by her daughter. During therapy, the psychiatrist used hypnosis and other suggestive techniques to dig out buried memories of abuse that Cool herself had allegedly experienced. In the process Cool became convinced that she had repressed memories...

INTRODUCTION In November 2006, a Russian dissident died from radioactive Polonium-210 (210Po) poisoning in London. Providing reassuring messages during a public health incident may be ineffective for individuals with high health anxiety (hypochondriasis). METHODS Members of the public who called a 24-hour telephone helpline were offered a follow-up call by a health protection specialist for r...

The role of the forensic psychiatrist is described in this paper. This role is unique in that it applies the research findings of the neurologist, the neuropsychologist, the criminologist, and other behavioral specialists to courtroom proceedings. The possibility that medical malfunction such as brain damage, endocrinological problems, toxicity, infection, or neurological disorder may be associ...

The brutal murder of 55-year-old Italian psychiatrist Barbara Capovani in April 2023, at the hands a man she had assisted during hospitalization four years prior, produced wave emotion within psychiatry, with important echoes media. It is death woman work, doctor, psychiatrist, professional National Health Service who has been taking care serious mental illnesses for years. She was beaten to by...

BACKGROUND Globally, access to mental healthcare is often lacking in rural, low-resource settings. Mental healthcare services integration in primary care settings is a key intervention to address this gap. A common strategy includes embedding mental healthcare workers on-site, and receiving consultation from an off-site psychiatrist. Primary care provider perspectives are important for successf...

PURPOSE To assess motivation to change (Mch) of patients with an eating disorder (ED) and its relationship with quality-of-life (QoL) by comparing patient and psychiatrist perceptions. METHOD Patients (n=358) with an ED completed the disease-specific Health-Related Quality of Life for Eating Disorders (HeRQoLED) questionnaire, the Eating Attitudes Test (EAT-26) and the Short-Form Health Surve...

Lady Caroline Lamb once wrote in her journal that Lord Byron was mad, bad, and dangerous to know. Presumably she was very angry with him and was searching for an appropriate set of pejorative words with which to describe him. All three words are significant in that we still describe people we don't like by combinations and modifications of these three concepts. Did others share Lady Lamb's view...

E-mail correspondence between psychiatrists and patients raises numerous legal concerns with respect to the ethics of the doctor-patient relationship. Case law has shown that a doctor-patient relationship may be established in the absence of face-to-face contact. Despite this, a surprisingly high number of physicians respond to unsolicited e-mails, some even going so far as to suggest diagnoses...

A colleague and I recently proposed a model to guide the description and reform of mental health services and to clarify service evaluation (Tansella & Thornicroft, 1998). The model, which we call the ‘mental health matrix’, consists of two dimensions, one temporal and one geographical. The temporal dimension comprises three phases: input (phase A), process (phase B) and outcome (phase C). The ...