Buried in last week’s legislation to bail out Wall Street was a small but important victory for healthcare in America. At the same time as passing a $700 billion rescue package for the financial sector last Friday, the US House of Representatives also passed a bill on mental health parity. Rumour has it that parity was added to the bail-out bill as a sweetener for reluctant House members. more…

Cracking up, to be broadcast this coming Sunday on BBC2, will be the second television programme to be broadcast in the context of the BBC’s Headroom campaign for mental health and wellbeing (bbc.co.uk/headroom). I had a preview at a screening organised by the Royal Society of Medicine. The documentary provided a moving insight into journalist and former government spin doctor Alastair Campbell’s depressive breakdown in 1986, and subsequent recovery. more…

Who’d be a psychiatrist? The emotional burden of caring for patients presenting in real distress; trying to negotiate a way forward when dealing with someone with a skewed sense of reality; potentially life and death risk assessments on a daily basis; general lampooning from medical colleagues… No wonder psychiatry’s not such a popular choice among UK medical graduates. more…

Baroness Warnock, one of Britain’s leading ethical experts recently talked of the “right to die” of patients with dementia. She called for more research into the illness, in order to establish whether patients with dementia were mentally competent. Thus when they reached a certain point in their illness, they could make a decision of whether they wanted to be “helped to die.” more…

Do art and misery share a bed? Although we might expect art to entertain and even, at a push, to improve its audience, artists themselves are surely supposed to suffer. It is part of the job spec. more…