Fran Gale | PubMed Health

PubMed2004

Time to father.

This paper reports the qualitative findings from 40 couples involved in a study exploring men's post-natal mental health. Interviews were conducted with individuals soon after the birth of their first child. Findings suggest that new fathers want to be more involved in the direct care and nurturing of their children than their fathers were with them. Discourses which construct fathers and inform social structures have not kept pace with men's changed attitudes and role expectations limiting the options available to men as fathers. In particular men's employment circumstances figure in their experience of adjusting to life as a father. Those fathers having least flexibility and autonomy in their work report experiencing, since the birth of their child, more unhappiness, anxiety, and generally higher levels of stress. These findings suggest increasing workplace flexibility and provisions such as parental leave are important for men's post-natal mental health.

Adaptation, Psychological↗

PubMed2002

Psychiatrists as a moral community? Psychiatry under the Nazis and its contemporary relevance.

OBJECTIVE: In Nazi-occupied Europe, substantial numbers of psychiatrists murdered their patients while many other psychiatrists were complicit with their actions. This paper addresses their motivations and actions, and with particular reference to Australia, explores issues of contemporary relevance. METHODS: The events are reviewed in their historical context using mainly secondary sources. RESULTS: The assumption that the term "Nazi" denotes a closed and unrepeatable chapter is questioned. As with the Holocaust that followed, medical killing of psychiatric patients was an open secret with gradations of collective knowing. Perpetrators were impelled by pressure from peers and superiors, unquestioning obedience, racist ideology and careerism. Perpetrators and bystanders' denial was facilitated by use of deceptive language, bureaucratic and technical proficiency, and notions such as "a greater cause" or "sacred mission". Dissociation and numbing were common. Psychiatrists were the main medical specialty involved because Nazi race and eugenic ideology (accepted by many psychiatrists) targeted mentally ill people for sterilization and euthanasia, and because psychiatrists were state-controlled and tended to objectify patients. Few psychiatrists resisted. IMPLICATIONS: Nazi psychiatry raises questions about medical ethics, stigma and mental illness, scientific "fashions", psychiatry's relations with government, and psychiatrists' perceived core business. Psychiatric resistance to future similar threats should be based on commemoration, broad-based education and reflection on cultural values, strong partnerships between psychiatrists and patients, and willingness to question publicly policies and attitudes that disadvantage and stigmatize groups. The principle fundamental to all these practices is an orientation to people as subjects rather than objects.

Euthanasia↗