Brain scientists have succeeded in fooling people into thinking they are inside the body of another person or a plastic dummy. The out-of-body experience - which is surprisingly easy to induce - will help researchers to understand how the human brain constructs a sense of physical self. The research may also lead to practical applications such as more intuitive remote control of robots, treatments for phantom limb pain in amputee patients and possible treatments for anorexia.
Women who have an elective legal abortion do not experience depression or long term psychological distress afterward, according to researchers at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, in Baltimore, Maryland (Contraception 2008;78:436-50, (doi:10:1016/j.contraception.2008.07.005). They reviewed the best 21 studies published in the past 20 years, involving thousands of women.
Criminals held in secure mental health units are to be tracked with global positioning systems to stop them absconding and reoffending, under a trial by a London hospital trust.
Potentially dangerous psychiatric patients are being fitted with GPS tracking devices to prevent them absconding on day leave. The South London and Maudsley NHS Trust has attached the £600 ankle devices on more than 60 medium and high risk patients under the pilot scheme. The trust said it had consulted patients and families. The devices, which can track a person's location to within a few yards, are already used for dementia sufferers. They came into use in south London after rapist Terence O'Keefe, 39, escaped from custody at King's College Hospital before strangling 73-year-old David Kemp.
The 30-year-old, known only as SB, could die without emergency treatment for aplastic anemia, a condition in which her bone marrow does not reproduce enough new blood cells. The Court of Protection has now ruled that doctors can restrain SB and force her to undergo the arduous but potentially life-saving treatment, which is administered through a vein in the heart and lasts for five days. SB has been detained under the Mental Health Act. Family Division judge Mrs Justice Hogg ruled that the patient did not have the capacity to make up her own mind over whether to undergo the treatment.
A high court judge in England has ordered that doctors can force a woman without the capacity to decide for herself to have lifesaving treatment for aplastic anaemia. Mrs Justice Hogg made the ruling in the Court of Protection after an unnamed NHS trust applied to the court with the backing of the Official Solicitor, who looks after the interests of those lacking capacity. The judge said the 30 year old woman, named only as SB, who is detained under the Mental Health Act, has a serious psychiatric disorder and lacks the capacity to decide for herself whether or not to have the potentially lifesaving treatment.
A patient in Broadmoor Hospital who has spent more than two decades alongside some of Britain's most dangerous criminals has won the right to have a review into his detention heard in public, The Independent has learned. The decision, which is thought to be a legal first, has major implications for the way Mental Health Tribunals function and will open the doors to one of the country's most secretive arbitration systems. The man, who cannot be named for legal reasons, has spent 23 years detained under the Mental Health Act, mostly at Broadmoor Hospital, the high-security facility in Berkshire that houses notorious offenders such as the serial killers Peter Sutcliffe and Robert Napper. He was committed in September 1986 after being convicted on two counts of attempted wounding. Doctors had classified the 52-year-old as having a mental illness and psychopathic disorder, but in September 2008 they changed the diagnosis to just a psychopathic disorder.
Expanded psychiatric 'bible' will see more people needlessly medicated, experts warn. Mild eccentrics, oddball romantics and the lonely, shy and sad could find themselves diagnosed with a mental disorder if proposals to add new conditions to the world's most widely used psychiatric bible go ahead, experts have warned.