the Electric Monk

I used to think journalists—especially when they cover tough topics like bioethics—get a bad rap for fumbling stories. Not today. Nope, today at the NUBC conference I haven’t heard a single person criticize the media for getting facts wrong, or sensationalizing a story, or explaining complex issues poorly.

Instead, at every turn, someone is lamenting that writers have missed a story altogether.

In his talk this morning on the tricky issues in treating adolescents with antidepressants, Steven Hyman noted how surprisingly prevalent suicide is: each year in the U.S. there are 20,000 homicides, but 30,000 suicides. Not what you’d expect by reading the papers, he said.

Of course: a murder and its investigation occasions a barrage of news coverage; a suicide does not. And surely it shouldn’t. Perhaps there, the complexity, and tragedy, demands instead a fuller treatment—a meaty feature story, an in-depth documentary.

Or maybe not. “People want to read about crises,” said Bonnie Steinbock, whom I talked to later in the morning. “And they want it made simple.”

Do we always tune out the substantive and the sticky in favor of the sexy?

Almost on cue, Dan Wikler sprinkled his talk this evening with assertions that the biggest bioethical conundrums around—the so-called “New Issues”—are the ones we’ve never heard about. We aren’t told about a disease unless it’s going to reach us in the privileged Western world. We aren’t made privy to the quantitative analysis undertaken in setting global public health priorities, because it’s just too mind-boggling.

Are there exceptions? Have you found yourself reading an article about a complex health issue so compelling that you couldn’t put it down?

—Megan Talkington

Prison is a brutal place designed to punish people for crimes they willfully committed. And yet a large portion of US prisoners are  mentally ill, many so ill that they are not fully rational.

Due to the nationwide lack of available community psychiatric services, prisons have become the primary treatment provider for the mentally ill. After being charged with a crime, mentally ill offenders enter a vicious cycle of incarceration, abuse, exacerbation of symptoms, and recidivism—and the treatment they do receive is almost universally sub par. Some argue that prison is absolutely no place for the mentally ill. Others contend that prisons are the only source of guaranteed treatment and supervision for the mentally ill in this country.

On what grounds should we imprison the mentally ill? If there are none, what are we committed to do?

–William Kowalsky