Dementia and Democracy: America’s Aging Judges and Politicians

Dementia and Democracy: America’s Aging Judges and Politicians
November 15, 2017 12:00 PM
Pound Hall, Room 102
Harvard Law School, 1563 Massachusetts Ave., Cambridge, MA

Our judiciary and our elected officials are getting old. Five of the nine Supreme Court Justices are 67 or older, with two over age 80. The President is 71, the Senate Majority Leader is 75, and the House Minority Leader is 77. Does the public have a right to know whether these officials have been screened for dementia? If the individuals don’t self-report their dementia status, should experts continue to adhere to the “Goldwater Rule” and refrain from offering an armchair diagnosis? As the nation reflects on its midterm elections, and prepares for the 2020 election cycle, these questions are timely and challenging.

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Instagram and the Regulation of Eating Disorder Communities

By Clíodhna Ní Chéileachair

I’m sure not how much time the average health law enthusiast spends on Instagram, but as a rare opportunity to see health regulation in real-time, I’d encourage logging onto the site, which curates content based on user profiles and by tags, and searching for the following tags; #thinspo, #thighgap, and #eatingdisorder. The site will either return no results, or will present the searcher with a warning message that “Posts with words or tags you’re searching for often encourage behavior that can cause harm and even lead to death” and encouraging the user to reach out for help, though the flagged content is still accessible if the user clicks-through. #thinspo (short for another neologism, ‘thinspiration’) is exactly what it sounds like – images designed to inspire an individual to restrict their diet, and exercise to attain what will generally be an underweight physique. Many social media sites have enacted similar bans on content as a reaction to the role that online communities can play in promoting eating disorders.

As a suite of illnesses, eating disorders have severe, and sometimes life-threatening medical complications. Anorexia nervosa has the highest death rate of all psychiatric illnesses; bulimia carries severe medical complications associated with starvation and purging including bone disease, heart complications, digestive tract distress, and even infertility, and EDNOS (eating disorder not otherwise specified) while carrying subclinical status in DMS-IV, carries similar levels of eating pathology and general psychopathology to anorexia nervosa and binge eating disorder, and a similar degree of danger to physical health to anorexia. Instagram had been criticised for its inaction in the face of an explosion of pro-eating disorder community activity on its site after Tumblr and Pinterest enacted bans on ‘thinspiration’ content, at which point many users migrated to Instagram’s platform. Five years on from the initial ban, some terms, like #starve and #purge will display the above warning message; other obvious tags for the pro-eating disorder community, like #skinnyinspiration and #thinspire attract no warning message and display images of emaciated women, romanticizations of eating disorders, images of individuals destroying food, and in line with clinical understandings of how eating disorders manifest themselves, images of self harm.

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“Siri, Should Robots Give Care?”

By Gali Katznelson

Having finally watched the movie Her, I may very well be committing the “Hollywood Scenarios” deadly sin by embarking on this post. This is one of the seven deadly sins of people who sensationalize artificial intelligence (AI), proposed by Rodney Brooks, former director of the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at MIT. Alas, without spoiling the movie Her (you should watch it), it’s easy for me to conceptualize a world in which machines can be trained to mimic a caring relationship and provide emotional support. This is because, in some ways, it’s already happening.

There are the familiar voice assistants, such as Apple’s Siri, to which people may be turning for health support. A study published in JAMA Internal Medicine in 2016 found that that the responses of smartphone assistants such as Apple’s Siri or Samsung’s S Voice to mental and physical health concerns were often inadequate. Telling Siri about sexual abuse elicited the response, “I don’t know what you mean by ‘I was raped.’” Telling Samsung’s S Voice you wanted to commit suicide led to the perhaps not-so-sensitive response, “Don’t you dare hurt yourself.” This technology proved far from perfect in providing salient guidance. However, since this study came out over a year ago, programmers behind Siri and S Voice have remedied these issues by providing more appropriate responses, such as counseling hotline information.

An AI specifically trained to provide helpful responses to mental health issues is Tess, “a psychological AI that administers highly personalized psychotherapy, psycho-education, and health-related reminders, on-demand, when and where the mental health professional isn’t.” X2AI, the company behind Tess, is in the process of finalizing an official Board of Ethics, and for good reason. The ethical considerations of an artificially intelligent therapist are rampant, from privacy and security issues to the potential for delivering misguided information that could cost lives. Read More

The State of Care in Mental Health Services in England 2014-2017

By John Tingle

The Care Quality Commission (CQC) is the independent regulator of health and adult social care in England. They have recently published a report of inspections on specialist mental health services. The  report is very thorough and detailed and reveals both good and bad practices. When reading the report however the poor practices identified eclipse the good ones.

Patient safety concerns

Concerns about patient safety are a constant and overarching theme in the report. The CQC biggest concern in this care area is patient safety:

“For both NHS and independent mental health services overall, and for eight of the 11 core services, safe was the key question that we most often rated as requires improvement or inadequate. At 31 May 2017, 36% of NHS core services and 34% of independent core services were rated as requires improvement for safe; a further 4% of NHS core services and 5% of independent core services were rated as inadequate for safe “(29).

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Vicarious Traumatization in the Wake of Community Violence: Healing the Helpers

This post is part of a series “Healing in the Wake of Community Violence: Lessons from Newtown and Beyond,” based on an event of the same name hosted at Harvard Law School in April 2017. Background on the series and links to other blog posts are here.

By Michelle Bosquet Enlow, PhD

depression_slideWhen a horrific violent event occurs, the community’s thoughts and efforts to help naturally extend out to the injured and traumatized survivors and the loved ones of those killed. However, the effects of such traumatic events ripple out beyond those so directly impacted. According to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (American Psychiatric Association, 2013), the definition of trauma includes not only direct exposure to actual or threatened death or serious injury, but also witnessing such an event or experiencing repeated or extreme exposure to aversive details of such an event. Under this more comprehensive definition, the circle of affected individuals in the wake of community violence widens to include professionals and community leaders who are tasked with tending to the safety, medical, emotional, instrumental, and spiritual needs of those wounded. These “helpers” include first responders (e.g., police officers, emergency medical technicians), medical and mental health professionals, case workers, and religious leaders. Read More

Newtown: A Public Health Law Perspective

This post is part of a series “Healing in the Wake of Community Violence: Lessons from Newtown and Beyond,” based on an event of the same name hosted at Harvard Law School in April 2017. Background on the series and links to other blog posts are here.

By Wendy E. Parmet

No man is an island

Entire of itself,

Every man is a piece of the continent,

A part of the main

—John Donne, 1624

Like John Donne’s famous Meditation XVII, Newtown, Kim Snyder’s documentary about the aftermath of the 2012 massacre at the Sandy Hook elementary school in Connecticut, forces us to reflect on the inter-connectedness of human life. As Newtown shows with power and poignancy, the victims of that awful massacre were not islands. They were a part of a continent comprised of their families, friends, community, and indeed, all who recall the awful day they were killed.

parmet-chartThis inescapable reality, that our lives and deaths can affect and even traumatize others, is perhaps sufficient to proclaim that gun violence is a public health problem. None of the over 30,000 Americans who die each year from gun violence (most by suicide), are islands. Nor are any of the over 78,000 Americans who are injured by firearms. All are part of the continent. Gun violence affects us all.

But gun violence is a public health problem for another, equally important reason. As with other public health problems, from obesity to HIV/AIDS, the risk that individuals face with respect to firearms is influenced significantly by factors that lie outside their own control. This is not simply because the victims of the Sandy Hook massacre did nothing, and could do nothing, to cause their own death. It is also because different populations face different levels of risk. Race, age, income, gender, geography and a host of other variables determine one’s risk of dying or being injured by firearms.  Read More

Newtown: A Story of Collective Grief and Trauma

This post is part of a series “Healing in the Wake of Community Violence: Lessons from Newtown and Beyond,” based on an event of the same name hosted at Harvard Law School in April 2017. Background on the series and links to other blog posts are here

By Kim Snyder, Director and Producer of Newtown

We believe we must be the family of America, recognizing that at the heart of the matter we are bound one to another. – Mario M. Cuomo

newtown_sign_flags_webWhen I first landed in Newtown over four years ago following the horrific tragedy at the Sandy Hook Elementary School, I was drawn first and foremost to a story of collective grief and trauma. Seeing the story in the larger context of commentary on America’s problem with gun violence came later. My producing partner, Maria Cuomo Cole, and I both felt we hadn’t seen a documentary that chronicled the long tail of collective trauma for years out, after the cameras had left. We also hadn’t seen this story told from the perspective of an entire town. It is important to note that Newtown is a community of 28,000 people, and the vision of the film sought to represent a sample of voices from various sub-communities. Over the course of the next three to four years, we built trust with members of the Newtown community and explored the trajectory of collective trauma and resilience as it reverberated throughout Newtown and beyond. Not surprisingly, survival guilt was a pervasive theme that emerged. Through the perspectives of multiple sub-communities of the town—the educators, first responders, medical providers, clergy, neighbors, and youth—we came to observe a journey of fracture, isolation, and repair as this courageous community struggled to survive in the aftermath of the unthinkable.  Read More

Healing in the Wake of Community Violence: Lessons from Newtown and Beyond

This post is part of a series “Healing in the Wake of Community Violence: Lessons from Newtown and Beyond,” based on an event of the same name hosted at Harvard Law School in April 2017. Background on the series and links to other blog posts are here.

By Cristine Hutchison-Jones, PhD

Community members gather at a memorial service after the Sandy Hook school shooting. Still from the documentary Newtown.
Community members gather at a memorial service after the Sandy Hook school shooting. Still from the documentary Newtown.

On June 12, 2016, an armed man walked into the Pulse night club—a gay bar in Orlando, Florida, packed with patrons enjoying Latin night—and opened fire. By the time the police shot the gunman three hours later, he had killed 49 people and wounded more than 50 others in the deadliest mass shooting by a single shooter in American history.

As we mark today’s anniversary, the news is awash with stories of the way the shooting continues to impact people a year later. Much of the coverage—then and now—has rightfully focused on those most directly affected: the victims and their loved ones, and the LGBTQ and Latinx communities who were targeted and disproportionately impacted by the attack. But amidst the coverage of survivors and their loved ones, some stories are taking a step back to look at the broader impact. This is in keeping with a recent trend to discuss the lasting effects of incidents of mass violence on the wider community. Today’s coverage of the Pulse night club shooting includes stories that focus on the EMTs, police officers, and health care workers who were first on the scene and treated victims in the immediate aftermath of the attack, and on the impact of secondary trauma in their lives. Read More

Negligent Failure to Prevent Suicide in the Age of Facebook Live

By Shailin Thomas

In 2016, Facebook unveiled a new tool that allows users to post live streams of video directly from their phones to the social media platform. This feature — known as “Facebook Live” — allows friends and followers to watch a user’s videos  as she films them. Originally conceptualized as a means of sharing experiences like concerts or vacations in real time, the platform was quickly adopted for uses Facebook likely didn’t see coming. In 2016, Lavish Reynolds used Facebook Live to document the killing of her boyfriend, Philando Castile, by the Minneapolis police, sparking a national debate surrounding police brutality and racial disparities in law enforcement. Recently, another use for Facebook Live has arisen — one that Facebook neither foresaw nor wants: people have been using Facebook Live as a means of broadcasting their suicides.

This tragic adaptation of the Facebook Live feature has put Facebook in a tough spot. It wants to prevent the suicides its platform is being used to document — and just a few weeks ago it rolled out real-time tools viewers of Live videos can use to identify and reach out to possible suicide victims while they’re filming — but it’s often too late by the time the video feed is live. Accordingly, Facebook is focusing its efforts at identifying those at risk of suicide before the situation becomes emergent. It currently has teams designing artificial intelligence algorithms for identifying users who may be at risk for suicide. These tools would scan Facebook users’ content, flagging individuals that have warning signs of self-harm or suicide in their posts.

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The Balancing Act Between Mental Illness and Gun Rights

Editor’s Note: This is an update of the post “Second Amendment Rights and Mental Illness,” originally published on September 1, 2015. 

By Mariam Ahmed, JD/MSPP

In September 2015, we offered a glimpse of the current landscape of laws addressing mental health and gun violence. Many of the laws addressed public safety concerns that arose from active shooters with mental illnesses. At both the state and federal levels, government officials continue to debate the relationship between gun violence and mental health issues. Questions of safety and stigma continue to be asked, and are leading to changes in the laws. Here’s where we stand now:

In July 2015, Congress introduced the Safer Communities Act of 2015, but after being passed around four different committees, it was never released to the House floor for a vote. If the bill had passed, it would have further clarified who is restricted from possessing a gun based on their mental health and treatment.

After the bill died in committee, agencies such as the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) and the Social Security Administration (SSA) have passed regulations to further define reporting and restriction requirements for people with mental illnesses. On January 4, 2016, HHS finalized a rule that modified the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 (HIPAA). The modification allows HIPAA-covered entities to release personal information to the National Instant Criminal Background Check System (NICS) if the person has a “mental health prohibitor” on their record that limits ability to possess, transport, receive, or ship a firearm under federal law. The rule went into effect on February 5, 2016. Read More