Sarah Zhang The Atlantic Originally poste 18 MAR 24 Here is an excerpt: In 1975, a psychiatric textbook put the frequency of incest at one in a million. In the 1980s, feminist scholars argued, based on the testimonies of victims, that incest was far more common than recognized, and in recent years, DNA has offered a new kind of biological proof. Widespread genetic testing is uncovering case after secret case of children born to close biological relatives-providing an unprecedented accounting of incest in modern society. The geneticist Jim Wilson, at the University of Edinburgh, was shocke ..read more

Ananya Nature.com Originally posted 19 March 2024 In 2022, Pratyusha Ria Kalluri, a graduate student in artificial intelligence (AI) at Stanford University in California, found something alarming in image-generating AI programs. When she prompted a popular tool for ‘a photo of an American man and his house’, it generated an image of a pale-skinned person in front of a large, colonial-style home. When she asked for ‘a photo of an African man and his fancy house’, it produced an image of a dark-skinned person in front of a simple mud house — despite the word ‘fancy’. After some digging, Kall ..read more

 Good morning- Here are a few pictures from my vacation in Italy. I will start posting again tomorrow ..read more

Good morning- All is well with me.  I hope you are enjoying Ethics & Psychology. Given I have been providing these articles and services for the past 13 years, I am finally taking a break. I plan to be off social media for the next month. I will start posting new articles and news stories some time in May. Best wishes ..read more

Phoebe Zerwick The New York Times Originally posted March 12, 2024 Here is an excerpt: At the time, only a handful of published medical studies had documented deathbed visions, and they largely relied on secondhand reports from doctors and other caregivers rather than accounts from patients themselves. On a flight home from a conference, Kerr outlined a study of his own, and in 2010, a research fellow, Anne Banas, signed on to conduct it with him. Like Kerr, Banas had a family member who, before his death, experienced visions — a grandfather who imagined himself in a train station with his ..read more

Seth Lazar The New York Times Originally posted 19 June 23 Here is an excerpt: I’ve based my philosophical work on the belief, inspired by Immanuel Kant, that humans have a special moral status — that we command respect regardless of whatever value we contribute to the world. Drawing on the work of the 20th-century political philosopher John Rawls, I’ve assumed that human moral status derives from our rational autonomy. This autonomy has two parts: first, our ability to decide on goals and commit to them; second, our possession of a sense of justice and the ability to resist norms imposed b ..read more

Emily Alpert Reyes Los Angeles Times Originally posted 9 April 24 Months after Kaiser Permanente reached a sweeping agreement with state regulators to improve its mental health services, the healthcare giant is facing union allegations that patients could be improperly losing such care. The National Union of Healthcare Workers, which represents thousands of Kaiser mental health professionals, complained earlier this year to state regulators that Kaiser appeared to be inappropriately handing off decisions about whether therapy is still medically necessary. The union alleged that Rula Healt ..read more

Eli Hager Propublica.com Originally posted 18 March 24 Diane Baird had spent four decades evaluating the relationships of poor families with their children. But last May, in a downtown Denver conference room, with lawyers surrounding her and a court reporter transcribing, she was the one under the microscope. Baird, a social worker and professional expert witness, has routinely advocated in juvenile court cases across Colorado that foster children be adopted by or remain in the custody of their foster parents rather than being reunified with their typically lower-income birth parents or ot ..read more

Michael DePeau-Wilson MedPage Today Originally posted 11 April 24 With the rise in patient-facing psychiatric chatbots powered by artificial intelligence (AI), the potential need for patient mental health data could drive a boom in cash-for-data scams, according to mental health experts. A recent example of controversial data collection appeared on Craigslist when a company called Therapy For All allegedly posted an advertisement offering money for recording therapy sessions without any additional information about how the recordings would be used. The company's advertisement and websit ..read more

Daniel P. Sulmasy The New England Journal of Medicine March 16, 2024 DOI: 10.1056/NEJMp2310498 Mind, body, and soul are inseparable. Throughout human history, healing has been regarded as a spiritual event. Illness (especially serious illness) inevitably raises questions beyond science- questions of a transcendent nature. These are questions of meaning, value, and relationship. 1 They touch on perennial and profoundly human enigmas. Why is my child sick? Do I still have value now that I am no longer a "productive" working member of society? Why does brokenness in my body remind me of the ..read more