Privacy & Surveillance

From TechCrunch: Facebook's new artificial intelligence technology will now scan all posts for suicidal thoughts and send mental health resources or contact local first-responders for users...

"ISIS provides existential fast food, and for some of the most spiritually hungry young Westerners, ISIS is like a Big Mac amidst a barren wasteland of an existence,” Omar Hague writes in the Psychiatric Times. “Who actually joins ISIS? Not psychopaths or the brainwashed, but rather everyday young people in social transition, on the margins of society, or amidst a crisis of identity.”

For The Boston Globe, Michael Rezendes writes about the dehumanizing conditions for mental health patients and the Bridgewater State Hospital. While previous exposés have...

The Scientific American reprints their interview with psychologist and terrorism expert John Horgan following the attacks in Paris on November 13th. “An issue I find problematic right now is the idea that to prevent terrorism, we have to first prevent radicalization… There are far more people who hold "radical" views than will ever become involved in terrorism, and there are plenty of terrorists (who are already small in number – a point we tend to forget) who don’t initially hold radical views but drift into terrorism regardless.”

In The Opinion Pages of the New York Times, Matthew Epperson discusses the devastating results of police acting as the primary responders to mental health crises. “If we are to prevent future tragedies, then we should be ready to invest in a more responsive mental-health system and relieve the police of the burden of being the primary, and often sole, responders.”

From Nature: Two teams funded by the US military's research arm, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), have begun preliminary trials of brain implants...

From Pacific Standard: The new Abilify MyCite pill, which contains a digital sensor that tracks whether a patient has ingested the drug, has the potential...

Speaking on the Essential Pittsburgh radio show, psychologist Brent Dean Robbins, former president of the Society for Humanistic Psychology, discusses how fear drives us toward irrational policies in the wake of terror attacks. He also offers commentary on the Murphy Bill, which he criticizes for unfairly scapegoating those diagnosed with mental illnesses.

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...

David Shern, from Johns Hopkins University, writes that the latest mental health “Murphy bill” in Congress is “an expansion of the approaches that got us into our current difficulties.” “Early intervention and prevention, assessable and patient-focused services with a rehabilitation orientation and increased funding for the community supports needed for successful recovery are the tickets to system improvement.”

“The federal privacy law known as HIPAA doesn’t cover home paternity tests, fitness trackers, or health apps. When a Florida woman complained after seeing...

Former president of Psychologists for Social Responsibility (PsySR), Roy Eidelson discusses efforts to undermine the Hoffman report which revealed the American Psychologica Association’s collusion in torture. "First, from a familiar playbook, we have the obligatory attack on the patriotism of Hoffman and those who have criticized psychologists’ participation in abusive detention and interrogation operations,” he writes. “The most outrageous example comes from two retired military officers, David Bolgiano and John Taylor. In a recent piece they described the Hoffman Report as a ‘classic attack of cowards’ and also stated, ‘By the publication and release of this report, the APA becomes a willing co-conspirator to the likes of al Qaeda and ISIS.’”

From Slate: The death of Charleena Lyles, who was shot by the police after she called them to report a burglary, serves as a reminder...

From Aeon: In the 1950s, psychiatrist Donald Ewen Cameron developed a treatment called psychic driving, which involved removing distressing memories and pathological behaviors through an...

From Forbes: Facebook is now using algorithms to monitor users' online activity for warning signs of suicidal ideation or self-harm. Article →­

“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...

-Thomas Moore of the Institute for Safe Medication Practices asks, "What has been learned about electronic health data as a primary data source for regulatory decisions regarding the harms of drugs?"

In this essay for Aeon, Kolin Coopman explores the impact and legacy of Michel Foucault. "It was a bio-power wielded by psychiatrists and doctors that,...

From The New York Times: New research suggests that Instagram users who have been diagnosed with depression tend to post darker, bluer, and grayer photos...

From Pacific Standard: Technology is increasingly collecting and sharing data on individuals' mental and physical health, which is then converted into useable knowledge, such as recommendations about...

-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."

For the North Carolina Law Review, Katie Rose Guest Pryal writes, that “ a psychiatric diagnosis, or involuntary civil commitment to a psychiatric ward—which is...

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...

-Facebook has made it easier for users to report posts from people who seem to be in psychological distress, but not everyone likes the plan.