Psychiatry and the UN Convention Against Torture.

Objective: To expand on psychiatry's duties under the United Nations (UN) Convention Against Torture.

Conclusions: As it is currently practised in Australia, psychiatry is in breach of a number of major international conventions. Full compliance with treaty obligations will entail substantial changes in current practice.

Toward an osteopathic psychiatry: the biocognitive model of mind.

Osteopathic medicine represents a valid tradition in Western medicine, but there are concerns about whether it is a viable tradition: will it end up a "poorer cousin" of the allopathic tradition or will it eventually simply be absorbed by the dominant model? This is particularly the case in psychiatry, where osteopathic medicine has never established a firm presence. Currently, the dominant ethos in psychiatry is reductive biologism, which tries to eliminate the notion of mind as a causative factor in behavior. The author's case is that this has failed to give rise to a human-centered psychiatry.

The adaptive response of Saccharomyces cerevisiae to mercury exposure.

The budding yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae has been shown to possess a number of discrete but overlapping adaptive stress responses. We show here that yeast has an adaptive stress response towards mercury and that this response overlaps to some extent with the H(2)O(2) and cadmium-inducible stress responses. Expression of the yeast GSH1 gene, encoding gamma-glutamylcysteine synthetase, is known to be regulated by hydrogen peroxide; in this study we show that expression of a GSH1-lacZ reporter gene is shown to be regulated by exposure to heavy metals, such as mercury and cadmium.