Many police officers, prosecutors, defense attorneys, judges, and parole boards have reformed how their court- or carceral-based work with patients who have mental illness proceeds. This article discusses how policies and protocols have evolved to help court and carceral workers…
Police officers and clinicians are exposed to a broad range of moral risks in the field. When they perceive that a moral transgression has been committed by an agent responding to those risks, they are susceptible to moral injury. This…
A clinician’s standard primary role is to treat and monitor their patients’ health and to be their ally. Clinicians with obligations to patients and to organizations, however, must also assess patients for nontherapeutic purposes (eg, readiness to resume work). These…
Ethical obligations to minimize harms and maximize benefits of diagnosis and treatment of disorders without biomarkers include navigating difficult-to-measure, perhaps clinically inexplicable, symptoms. Among potential harms are public stigma, self-stigma, label avoidance, and the negative influence these stigmas have on…
Medications, like all interventions, shape the ways in which physicians see disease, provide care, define successful outcomes, and organize health care systems. Pharmaceuticals make symptoms and biological drug targets more visible while rendering individuals and their social suffering invisible, thereby…
Too many men who suffer from depression remain undiagnosed. While men are diagnosed with depression at half the rate of women, they die by suicide 3 to 4 times as frequently. Gendered processes of socialization affect how some boys and…
Invisibility of racial and ethnic inequity in clinical research means many important features of disease etiology and symptom presentation are often unaccounted for. Similarly, binary (ie, gay or straight) definitions of sexuality render bisexual women’s experiences invisible, and this invisibility…
Some illnesses and diseases are not apparent to onlookers. Conditions like chronic fatigue syndrome, fibromyalgia, multiple sclerosis, postconcussive syndrome, endometriosis, and many psychiatric illnesses, for example, have symptoms that are not easily or at all measurable. Both clinicians and health…
For years, physicians have debated how best to care for children with differences in sex development (DSD, also termed intersex). Stories of suffering of adults who underwent early surgical intervention for DSD have led many health organizations to call for…
Transgenerational trauma is a potential barrier to achieving a healthy and holistic patient-physician relationship, particularly for Black Americans. Examination of deeply rooted historical injustices that Black patients suffer in health care and how they undermine trust can help clarify connections…
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