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Telehealth Services in the Context of Intimate Partner Violence (IPV): Addressing Potential Risks to Safety and Security
Telehealth services are critical to ensuring that people who experience intimate partner violence (IPV) have access to needed mental health and substance use care. At the same time, accessing services from home when an abusive partner is present can pose safety, security, and privacy risks to survivors of IPV and other household members.
Social Determinants of Mental Health in Children and Youth
The field of psychiatry is at a historic precipice in advancing a more equitable society and mental health care system. A deeper understanding of the interplay between social determinants and mental health conditions is critical and is a core skill of structural competency.
Emotional Support Animals
This resource document provides an overview of the clinical, ethical, and legal considerations that a psychiatrist should consider when asked to write an emotional support animal (ESA) letter for a patient.
Suicide in Communications and Media
Suicide is a leading cause of death in the United States. Research demonstrates that how media reports on suicide and suicide attempts may either increase contagion risk or decrease the risk of future suicide attempts, rendering the issue a matter of public health and safety.
Ethical and Practical Implications of Psychedelics in Psychiatry
This resource document focuses on several of the ethical and practical issues surrounding psychedelics in their current investigational stage, and also discusses issues for psychiatrists to consider if psychedelics one day become available for broad clinical use.
Addressing the Migration Emergency and Human Rights of Haitians
Thousands of Haitians are traveling to the U.S.-Mexico border to seek asylum in the U.S., with many settling in camps after being denied entry. The U.S. government is responding with the deportations of thousands to Haiti. These deportations put Haitians at risk of violence, being unhoused, and even death amid Haiti’s political, economic, and environmental crises.
Seclusion or Restraint
This resource document is intended to support psychiatrists and other healthcare clinicians who may utilize seclusion or restraint.
Consent for Voluntary Hospitalization of Minors
This resource document seeks to lay out the major issues involved in formulating the rules governing the psychiatric hospitalization of minors so that psychiatrists can be better informed when rendering their judgment in particular cases. Admission for substance use treatment raises somewhat different concerns that are not addressed in this document.
Advocating for Anti-Racist Mental Health Policies with a Focus on Dismantling Anti-Black Racism
Racial injustices have long contributed to mental health disparities for minority and underserved populations. More than 50 years ago, Dr. Melvin Sabshin and colleagues documented the “structured pattern of racism” in psychiatry in a series of articles in the American Journal of Psychiatry. Insufficient progress has been made in eradicating institutionalized racism in psychiatry. Race-based disparities in psychiatric care and mental & behavioral health reflect this lack of progress and reproduce racial inequities that span all sectors of our society.
Approaches to Youth in Mental Health Crisis
This document provides an overview of contemporary approaches to youth in mental health crises with practical, solution-oriented recommendations. It provides developmental considerations when dealing with youth in crisis, the continuum of existing response models and encourages readers to understand their role in advocacy through clinical vignettes. The resource document emphasizes de-escalation and rapid linkage to clinical evaluation services and supports the APA’s goal of ensuring young people in mental health crises and their families receive support by first responders who are appropriately trained to address their needs. This document provides an overview of contemporary approaches to youth in mental health crises with practical, solution-oriented recommendations. It provides developmental considerations when dealing with youth in crisis, the continuum of existing response models and encourages readers to understand their role in advocacy through clinical vignettes. The resource document emphasizes de-escalation and rapid linkage to clinical evaluation services and supports the APA’s goal of ensuring young people in mental health crises and their families receive support by first responders who are appropriately trained to address their needs.
Ethics at the Interface of Religion, Spirituality, and Psychiatric Practice
Historically, psychiatry has had a fraught relationship with religion. One example can be found in the writings of Sigmund Freud, who was dismissive of religion and viewed it as a form of mental illness, drawing parallels between the rituals of obsessional patients and those of very religious people (Breakey 2001). However, there are also works throughout history demonstrating the harmonious relationship between psychiatry and religion, suggesting that the notion of an adversarial relationship between the two may not be a complete picture (Frankl 1975, Meissner 1984, Meissner 1987).
Safe Consumption Facilities
In 2019, there were nearly 72,000 U.S. overdose deaths, a new record high. Most of these overdose deaths involved opioids, with rising involvement of fentanyl and fentanyl analogues, which are increasingly found in street heroin and other opioids and often without the knowledge of the user. Even more concerning, it appears that the coronavirus pandemic is further worsening the overdose crisis.1 In the context of this ongoing crisis, psychiatrists must be aware of the full range of policy, organizational, and public health strategies impacting the lives of people who use drugs (PWUD). This document aims to inform psychiatrists about one such strategy: Safe Consumption Facilities (SCFs, also known as “supervised consumption sites”), an approach that has long been a feature of harm reduction efforts in certain countries and that has attracted increasing attention in the United States.