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Tag: stigma

Death of a Porn Star

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By Tim Lahey, MD

 

Porn stars all across San Fernando were told to put their clothes back on and go home a couple of weeks ago on the news that a 29 year-old adult actress named Cameron Bay tested positive for HIV.

Shortly thereafter, the Internet lit up. News, judgments, and jokes shot left and right in newsrooms as freely as bodily fluids fly on set. Countless reporters and pundits surely worked overtime to do the deep background: who were Ms. Bay’s co-actors, who did what to whom, and inquiring minds want to know: were condoms used? Imagine the frenzied speculation, all those sticky keystrokes.

Don’t get me wrong: the details of the whodunit have medical import. Public health workers need to find who is at risk. Those who are at risk need testing and education including reminders that early tests can be falsely negative and must be repeated. Since this isn’t the first case of HIV among the scantily clad actors of San Fernando, CA, Ms. Bay’s diagnosis demands we try again to get porn stars to practice safer sex. My guess is legal maneuvers will never do much to affect the sex lives of the nude and infamous, but if porn viewers could learn to have fun even with a condom on set there might be a hope.

Twitter captured all this and more. It showed the diversity of our reactions to Ms. Bay and people like her. Some tweets expressed a sense of inevitability:

Some were judgmental:


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Mislabeling Medical Illness

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By Allen Frances, MD

Many readers of my previous blog listing the 10 worst suggestions in DSM 5 were shocked that I failed to mention an 11th dangerous mistake — that DSM-5 will harm people who are medically ill by mislabeling their medical problems as mental disorder. They are absolutely right. I apologize for my previous failure to attend to this danger and hope it is not now too late to influence the process.

Adding to the woes of the medically ill could be one of the biggest problems caused by DSM-5. It will do this in two ways: 1) by encouraging a quick jump to the erroneous conclusion that someone’s physical symptoms are ‘all in the head’; and 2) by mislabeling as mental disorders what are really just the normal emotional reactions that people understandably have in response to a medical illness.

UK health advocate, Suzy Chapman, has closely monitored every step in the development of DSM-5. Her website is the best available resource for finding just about everything you need to know about DSM-5 and ICD-11. Ms Chapman sent me a troubling email that summarizes where DSM-5 has gone wrong and the many harmful consequences that will follow. More details are available at: ‘Somatic Symptom Disorder could capture millions more under mental health diagnosis’ (http://wp.me/pKrrB-29B )

Ms Chapman writes:

…The DSM-5 Somatic Symptom Disorders Work Group is planning to eliminate several little used DSM-IV Somatoform Disorders and replace them instead with an extremely broad new category that is likely to be wildly overused (‘Somatic Symptom Disorder’ — SSD).

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Should Your Boss Encourage You to Take Drugs?

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By Michael Schrage

A top executive I know recently decided to take Inderal before making high-pressure/high-anxiety presentations. The impact was immediate. She felt more relaxed, confident and effective. Her people agreed.

Would she encourage a comparably anxious subordinate to take the drug? No. But if that employee’s anxiety really undermined his or her effectiveness, she’d share her story and make them aware of the Inderal option. She certainly wouldn’t disapprove of an employee seeking prescription help to become more productive.

No one in America thinks twice anymore if a colleague takes Prozac. (Roughly 10% of workers in Europe and the U.K. use antidepressants, as well). Caffeine has clearly become the (legal) stimulant of business choice and Starbucks its most profitable global pusher (two shots of espresso, please).

Increasingly, prescription ADHD drugs like Adderall, dedicated to improving attention deficits, are finding their way into gray market use by students looking for a cognitive edge. When one looks at existing and in-the-pipeline drugs for Alzheimer’s and other neurophysiological therapies for aging OECD populations with retirements delayed, the odds are that far more employees are going to be taking more drugs to get more work done better.

Performance-enhancing (or degraded performance-delaying) drugs will become as common as that revitalizing cup of afternoon coffee.

Should that be encouraged? Or should management pretend those options don’t exist?

Most managers would believe they’re doing a good thing if they encouraged a hard-of-hearing employee to explore a hearing aid or a visually-impaired colleague to consider glasses. By contrast, encouraging an under-performing subordinate to lose 25 pounds, get a hair transplant or contact-lenses would likely inspire a formal complaint to Human Resources and/or a possible lawsuit. Ironically, the money isn’t the issue here; the business norms associated with perceived cosmetic and aesthetic concerns are radically different from those attached to job performance and productivity.Continue reading…