Tag: Policy

A man holds a shield in his hand.

The Pathology (and Politics) of Liability Shields

Nicolas P. Terry Leave a comment

By Nicolas Terry

Over one million Americans have died from COVID-19, while 20 percent of those who survive may develop post-COVID conditions. With weak safety net policies and high health care costs it would hardly be surprising if our fellow citizens tried to shift some of their COVID costs to arguably responsible defendants.

For example, lawsuits could have emerged against either businesses (or their employees) alleging negligent failure to mitigate (e.g., vaccinate, mask, or even implement hygiene theater policies), or against health care providers for failures in the professional standard of care (e.g., failure to amass/provide adequate numbers of personal protective equipment or ventilators).

However, the predicted litigation explosion has not materialized. In its stead (and without any apparent causal valence) we have experienced a proliferation of liability shield (aka limited immunity) laws.

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a crowd of people shuffling through a sidewalk

Reopening the Country During COVID-19: Legal and Policy Issues 

The Petrie-Flom Center Staff Leave a comment

By Mark A. Hall and David M. Studdert

Every public health crisis poses unique legal and ethical challenges, but none more so in modern times than the novel coronavirus pandemic. Urgent responses to the pandemic have halted movement and work and dramatically changed daily routines for most of our population in ways entirely unprecedented. As we wrote recently, this sweeping response challenges a host of civil liberties that state and federal statutes and constitutions protect. It should come as no surprise, then, that we are starting to hear widespread grumbling. There are even reports of some initial “protest” lawsuits. But even without overt legal challenges, public health officials are well attuned to the need to respect civil liberties in setting appropriate policies. And, if those officials are not well-attuned, politicians, who are concerned about widespread economic fallout, will forcefully remind them.

It follows that there is a pressing need for a set of principles to guide not just the imposing of COVID-type restrictions, but also relaxing or lifting them.

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Culture, Medicine, and Psychiatry

ylenfest Leave a comment

By Yusuf Lenfest

Professor Robert Sapolsky, a professor of biology and neurology at Stanford University, rightly identifies depression as a particularly crippling disease insofar as it affects one’s very response mechanisms and modes of coping, namely, experiences of gratitude, joy, pleasure—at bottom, some of the key emotions of resistance and healing. In discussing depression, he provides an overview of the biological and chemical elements, touching on the role of neurotransmitters (epinephrine, dopamine, serotonin) in depression, and a summary of the psychological elements (and their relation to the biological); as such, his description focuses primarily on physical and biological explanations. However, to examine depression or any psychological illness in purely physical and biological terms misses a crucial element, namely: human culture, lived experience, and the different modes or methods of social thought. Culture plays a primary role in defining many mental disorders such as schizophrenia and psychosis, and even the symptoms, intensities, or typologies of depression, according to Arthur Kleinman in his seminal Writing at the Margin: Discourse Between Anthropology and Medicine.

Despite these findings, Western biomedicine by and large continues to analyze mental health in clinical and biological terms. This is not insignificant given the statistics:

  • Approximately 1 in 5 adults in the U.S.- 43.8 million or 18.5% – experiences mental illness in a given year.
  •  Approximately 1 in 5 youth aged 13–18 (21.4%) experiences a severe mental disorder at some point during their life. For children aged 8–15, the estimate is 13%.
  • Only 41% of adults in the U.S. with a mental health condition received mental health services in the past year. Among adults with a serious mental illness, 62.9% received mental health services in the past year.
  • Just over half (50.6%) of children aged 8-15 received mental health services in the previous year. (National Alliance on Mental Health)

Current trends in medicine suggest that the medical community broadly speaking is ill-equipped to adequately tackle this rising trend, especially with regard to the treatment of diverse patients from various cultures, religions, and social circumstances. To best address the problem, the medical community – both on the level of policy and practice -ought to take steps to understand and treat mental illness more holistically.

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