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Prison Overcrowding: Does It Affect Mental Health?

In California, the U.S. district court has ordered that tens of thousands of prisoners be released to reduce overcrowding. The case, Schwarzenegger v. Plata, was argued this past Tuesday and the transcript is online.

This is relevant to a psychiatry blog because one of the arguments used in support of the releases is the contention that overcrowded facilities reduce access to mental health and medical services and that overcrowding causes mental deterioration and breakdown. The APA filed an amicus brief in the case, but the brief isn’t available online yet. (Keep an eye out for it here.)

The challenge with this case is that there is no (or extremely little) actual research to support the link between overcrowding and psychological problems. Correctional systems have spent a lot of time litigating issues — and experts make a fair amount of money working on these cases — without actual data. Read more »

*This blog post was originally published at Shrink Rap*

Latest Interviews

IDEA Labs: Medical Students Take The Lead In Healthcare Innovation

It’s no secret that doctors are disappointed with the way that the U.S. healthcare system is evolving. Most feel helpless about improving their work conditions or solving technical problems in patient care. Fortunately one young medical student was undeterred by the mountain of disappointment carried by his senior clinician mentors…

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How To Be A Successful Patient: Young Doctors Offer Some Advice

I am proud to be a part of the American Resident Project an initiative that promotes the writing of medical students residents and new physicians as they explore ideas for transforming American health care delivery. I recently had the opportunity to interview three of the writing fellows about how to…

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Latest Book Reviews

Book Review: Is Empathy Learned By Faking It Till It’s Real?

I m often asked to do book reviews on my blog and I rarely agree to them. This is because it takes me a long time to read a book and then if I don t enjoy it I figure the author would rather me remain silent than publish my…

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The Spirit Of The Place: Samuel Shem’s New Book May Depress You

When I was in medical school I read Samuel Shem s House Of God as a right of passage. At the time I found it to be a cynical yet eerily accurate portrayal of the underbelly of academic medicine. I gained comfort from its gallows humor and it made me…

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Eat To Save Your Life: Another Half-True Diet Book

I am hesitant to review diet books because they are so often a tangled mess of fact and fiction. Teasing out their truth from falsehood is about as exhausting as delousing a long-haired elementary school student. However after being approached by the authors’ PR agency with the promise of a…

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