Privacy & Surveillance

Bloomberg Businessweek investigates the companies involved in buying and selling mass databases of people's prescription-drug histories, and the new ways in which that information is being used by skirting privacy protections.

Washington Post columnist Steven Petrow gets a friend recommendation from Facebook, and it turns out to be his current psychotherapist, who isn't using any...

Wired examines some of the latest self-surveillance mobile apps that people are using to help themselves manage their own behaviors. "Through the discreet and...

Concerns have been raised about inconsistent and unreliable results, which may lead to injustices in sentencing or even wrongful convictions.

“The pharma industry loses tens of billions in worldwide sales each year when patients don’t fill, or refill, their prescriptions,” Rebecca Robbins reports for STAT. So...

“An ordinary person becomes a torturer with surprising ease. The hard part comes when it’s time to be human again,” neuroscientist Shane O’Mara writes...

“According to Allred's tweets from Tuesday night, the New York Police Department visited him at home to investigate ‘political statements’ he made ‘on campus...

Writing for the Campaign for Real Change in Mental Health Policy, psychiatrist Coni Kalinowski implores others not to support the Murphy Bill “or any other legislation that encourages the use of involuntary outpatient commitment for psychiatric treatment.” “For 9 years, I trained and worked in Wisconsin where involuntary outpatient commitment has been used to force people into treatment for over 30 years, and I can tell you first hand, it does far more harm than good to individuals, it is very expensive, and it does not address the public health and safety issues that people hope it will.”

Researchers recommend a ‘politically-informed focus', including activism, when assessing children and designing interventions in areas of chronic political violence.

"Disappointing" and "tragedy" are some of the descriptives everyday doctors are using to describe the expanding use of electronic medical records, according to The...

Researchers find few existing "psychopathology scales" are appropriate for global utilization.

-New Scientist discusses the reasons that eight US professional health organizations "collectively took a stand against a law that on the face of it, seems like plain common sense."

From MIT Technology Review: A new app, Triggr, is using smartphone data to track the behavior of people struggling with substance use and addiction, with...

In this piece for The Atlantic, Chris Millard discusses how increased medical, psychiatric, and psychoanalytic scrutiny of motherhood in the 20th century set the stage...

Today on Radio Times, U.S. Representative Tim Murphy (R-PA), Mark Salzer, professor and chair of the Department of Rehabilitation Sciences at Temple University, and Leah...

The Intercept illustrates the growing insecurity of our medical and mental health data in an age of privacy breaches. Individual stories detail instances of electronic therapy notes being shared between all doctors in a practice, employees being fired after mental health information is disclosed through workplace wellness programs, and police data on past suicide attempts being used to prevent Canadian citizens from crossing the US border.

If their clients admit to having suicidal feelings or show evidence of serious psychological problems, how do lawyers' legal responsibilities to their clients change...

Researchers develop a novel approach to mapping personal well-being networks for those diagnosed with severe mental illness (SMI) that incorporates social ties, connections to place, and meaningful activities.

From The Nation: In two new books, Foucault: The Birth of Power and Foucault's Last Decade, Stuart Elden investigates some of the unexplored aspects of Michel Foucault's...

"A nationalist lawmaker suggests making politicians disclose their psychiatric problems to the public and punish those who try to hide them by removing them...

Dr. Dainius Pūras argues that the status quo in mental health treatment is no longer acceptable and demands political action to promote human rights.

In Gigaom, privacy and security journalist David Meyer discusses the release of a new app from the UK Samaritans called "Radar." The app monitors...

From TruthHawk: Facebook's technology has an unprecedented ability to surveil and manipulate people. Article →­  

From Neo.life: The emerging discipline of computational psychiatry, which aims to use machine-learning algorithms to recognize patterns of mental distress and identify treatments that may be...

Legislation is being advanced that would speed up the FDA’s approval process for new drugs and medical devices, according to a report by the Pacific Standard. Pharmaceutical and medical device companies have been lobbying heavily to reduce regulations and are winning over bipartisan support by attaching these measures to increased mental health funding.