Ethical and Public Health Considerations for Integrating Physicians with Mental Disability into the Physician Workforce.

Stigma against mental disability within the medical field continues to impose significant barriers on physicians and trainees. Here, we examine several implications of this stigma and propose steps toward greater inclusion of persons with mental disabilities in the physician workforce.

From disability to human flourishing: how fourth wave psychotherapies can help to reimagine rehabilitation and medicine as a whole.

With disabled patients, clinicians are often mechanistically oriented, limiting goals to bodily improvements of perceived deficits back to species-typical functioning. Psychological goals, when present at all, are often pessimistically narrow, or phenomenologically shallow. Recent research on fourth wave psychotherapies helps broaden clinical concepts of healing and treatment beyond mere deficit remediation, and helps match clinical goals with the richness of human flourishing and the layered complexity of the patient's evolving experience of meaning.

The psychology of coordination and common knowledge.

Research on human cooperation has concentrated on the puzzle of altruism, in which 1 actor incurs a cost to benefit another, and the psychology of reciprocity, which evolved to solve this problem. We examine the complementary puzzle of mutualism, in which actors can benefit each other simultaneously, and the psychology of coordination, which ensures such benefits. Coordination is facilitated by common knowledge: the recursive belief state in which A knows X, B knows X, A knows that B knows X, B knows that A knows X, ad infinitum.

Emerging perspectives on adolescents and young adults with high-functioning autism spectrum disorders, violence, and criminal law.

As the prevalence of autism spectrum disorders (ASDs) has increased, attention has shifted toward consideration of ASDs in adolescence and adulthood, as well as public health repercussions for this population. Since the social and emotional deficits within ASDs may be salient during incidents of unintended criminal or violent behavior, one area of focus is involvement of adolescents and young adults with ASD in the criminal justice system. Without a thorough understanding of how and why individuals with ASDs may exhibit criminal behavior, judicial and legislative state systems have begun to develop policies lacking a substantial evidence base.

Dehumanization in Medicine: Causes, Solutions, and Functions.

Dehumanization is endemic in medical practice. This article discusses the psychology of dehumanization resulting from inherent features of medical settings, the doctor-patient relationship, and the deployment of routine clinical practices. First, we identify six major causes of dehumanization in medical settings (deindividuating practices, impaired patient agency, dissimilarity, mechanization, empathy reduction, and moral disengagement).