Health Alert, DLA Phillips Fox, 7 September 2010
“This inquest concerned the death of Mr X (name suppressed) (aged 53 years), who died from multiple large incised defects to the head and a single stab wound to the chest. Mr X’s son, Mr A, was charged with his murder. At the time of the stabbing, Mr A was on a Community Treatment Order supervised by Peninsula Health Mental Health Services. On 19 April 2004, when Mr A appeared at the Supreme Court of Victoria before Justice Teague, the jury returned a verdict of not guilty on the grounds of mental impairment. …The Coroner (Audrey Jamieson) found that Mr A’s management on a CTO by Peninsula Health Mental Health Service was reasonable and appropriate and that it did not contribute to Mr X’s death. The Coroner also commented on the management of mental illness in Victoria. …”
Find summary and link to decision here.
Archive for category Mental Illness
127902 Mr X
Sep 8
NSW Government, published 27 August 2010
“The objects of this Regulation are:
(a) to prescribe certain conditions or illnesses the treatment of which is not to be regarded as psychosurgery, so that neurological procedures carried out to relieve symptoms of those conditions or illnesses are not prohibited as psychosurgery, and
(b) to update references to the Protective Commissioner, as the functions of the Protective Commissioner have been taken over by the NSW Trustee and Guardian.”
Find regulation here.
“An intellectually disabled woman is suing the Department of Community Services, saying it imprisoned her in a residential centre for the disabled. Joanne Darcy had initially been placed at the Kanangra Centre for two months after she was charged over a fight about a pushbike. But it was not until more than six years later that she was allowed to leave the facility near Newcastle, where, she says, she lived under lock and key.”
Find article here.
The Guardian, By Moheb Costandi, 1 September 2010
“Far from being at the fringes of medical research, their work was fully supported and funded by the Canadian government, and became a promising new area of research that played a role in modernising the field of psychiatry. But despite the encouraging results, studies of LSD therapy ended abruptly in the late 1960s, and did not resume again until some 40 years later.”
Find article here.
SMH, By Kim Arlington, 28 August 2010
“”JULIA” is detained indefinitely in a hospital psychiatric unit after stabbing her father and teenaged sister to death while in the grip of psychosis in 2007. Her psychiatrist, Yolande Lucire, was yesterday banned from treating any more patients after the NSW Medical Tribunal found there were serious shortcomings in the way she managed the 25-year-old’s illness.”
Find article here.
Cost-effectiveness Analysis of a Rural Telemedicine Collaborative Care Intervention for Depression
Aug 21
Archives of General Psychiatry, By Jeffrey M. Pyne, MD; John C. Fortney, PhD; Shanti Prakash Tripathi, MS; Matthew L. Maciejewski, PhD; Mark J. Edlund, MD, PhD; D. Keith Williams, PhD Arch Gen Psychiatry. 2010;67(8):812-821. doi:10.1001/archgenpsychiatry.2010.82
“Collaborative care interventions for depression in primary care settings are clinically beneficial and cost-effective. Most prior studies were conducted in urban settings. To examine the cost-effectiveness of a rural telemedicine-based collaborative care depression intervention. In rural settings, a telemedicine-based collaborative care intervention for depression is effective and expensive. The mean base case result was $85 634/QALY, which is greater than cost per QALY ratios reported for other, mostly urban, depression collaborative care interventions.”
Find article here.
Medical News Today, AP, 20 August 2010
“”It’s like a magic drug”, said the lead researcher of a team from Yale University in the US whose latest study suggests that ketamine, a drug normally used as an anasthetic, could be reformulated as an anti-depressant that takes effect in hours rather than the usual weeks and months of most available medications. You can read how the researchers discovered this effect in a study they performed on rats which was published online on 20 August in the journal Science.”
Find article here.
The India Times, IANS, 19 August 2010
“The drugs can help patients alter their perception of problems or pain levels, according to Swiss researchers. Trials suggest that LSD or Lysergic Acid Diathylamide, banned worldwide since the 1960s and 1970s, helps patients of cancer and other terminal illnesses come to terms with their fate, the Daily Mail reports. ”
Find article here.
Health Alert, DLA PHillips Fox, 16 August 2010
“Catchwords:- Negligence –professional negligence –causation –PTSD – hypernatremia –alleged failure to diagnose and treat –negligent treatment by hospital –relationship of any negligent act to damage sustained.
“This case concerns aspects of the recent High Court authority of Tabet v Gett [2010] HCA 12 which reinforced that a plaintiff must be able to satisfy the court that (1) the defendant was factually negligent, in that their treatment fell below the required standard of care, and (2) the negligence was in fact, more probably than not, a cause of the plaintiff’s injury. …His honour observed that where a plaintiff suffers a psychiatric injury, not a physical injury, as a result of treatment during hospitalisation, the causal link between negligence and psychiatric injury may be harder to satisfy.”
Find summary and link to decision here.
MJA 2010; 193 (4): 239-242
Authors: Christopher J Ryan and Sascha Callaghan
- When a patient presents to hospital after a suicide attempt and appears to refuse treatment, clinicians should first assess if he or she should be treated under mental health legislation, regardless of competence to refuse treatment.
- When it is not possible or is inappropriate to treat under mental health legislation, the person’s competence to refuse treatment should be assessed. If the patient is definitely competent, his or her decision to refuse treatment should probably be honoured.
- If an incompetent patient carries a document refusing treatment, clinicians must determine the validity of that document as an advance care directive — including whether or not the patient was competent at the time it was written.
- The law around the right to refuse treatment after a suicide attempt remains unclear and, if uncertain of what to do, clinicians should provide urgently required life-saving treatment and simultaneously seek an urgent court order to clarify how they should proceed.
- In all but extraordinary circumstances, a patient who refuses treatment after a suicide attempt can and should be given life-saving treatment, under either mental health legislation or the common law concept of necessity.
Find abstract here.