Post by miketully on Apr 18, 2014 20:09:31 GMT
In case you’ve ever wondered, when you take a psychiatrist to dinner (especially a forensic psychiatrist, like me), he doesn’t leave the office 100 percent. No well-trained psychiatrist can. The “third ear” we develop during training – the one that catches meaningful turns of phrase or attempts to be evasive – can’t be left at the office door entirely.
When I had dinner with Lou and Linda Pelletier and three of their four daughters, Jennifer, Jessica and Julia, a few nights ago in Massachusetts, I wasn’t trying to evaluate them. They aren’t my patients. But I was listening for discordant psychological notes, nonetheless – ones that might tell me I was sitting with people destructive enough to merit permanently losing custody of their teenage daughter Justina.
For anyone who hasn’t heard the story, the Pelletiers brought Justina to Boston Children’s Hospital early last year for a consultation related to complications from what they had been told was mitochondrial disease, a complex and controversial physical disorder diagnosed in Justina by doctors at New England Medical Center in Boston (and with which another of their daughters has also been diagnosed). Instead, the Pelletiers were told by a doctor who intervened in her consultation that Justina had no physical ailment, but was, instead, suffering from somatoform disorder – physical symptoms caused not by underlying bodily abnormalities but by underlying psychological issues.
The Pelletiers did not want to leave Justina at Children’s Hospital, but they were not allowed to take her home. She was seized by the hospital, which asserted the Pelletiers would not accept their daughter’s obvious psychiatric disorder and, therefore, clearly would impede needed treatment. Courts in Massachusetts have agreed, recently awarding permanent custody of Justina to the Massachusetts Department of Children and Families (DCF).
www.foxnews.com/opinion/2014/04/17/my-dinner-with-family-justina-pelletier/
When I had dinner with Lou and Linda Pelletier and three of their four daughters, Jennifer, Jessica and Julia, a few nights ago in Massachusetts, I wasn’t trying to evaluate them. They aren’t my patients. But I was listening for discordant psychological notes, nonetheless – ones that might tell me I was sitting with people destructive enough to merit permanently losing custody of their teenage daughter Justina.
For anyone who hasn’t heard the story, the Pelletiers brought Justina to Boston Children’s Hospital early last year for a consultation related to complications from what they had been told was mitochondrial disease, a complex and controversial physical disorder diagnosed in Justina by doctors at New England Medical Center in Boston (and with which another of their daughters has also been diagnosed). Instead, the Pelletiers were told by a doctor who intervened in her consultation that Justina had no physical ailment, but was, instead, suffering from somatoform disorder – physical symptoms caused not by underlying bodily abnormalities but by underlying psychological issues.
The Pelletiers did not want to leave Justina at Children’s Hospital, but they were not allowed to take her home. She was seized by the hospital, which asserted the Pelletiers would not accept their daughter’s obvious psychiatric disorder and, therefore, clearly would impede needed treatment. Courts in Massachusetts have agreed, recently awarding permanent custody of Justina to the Massachusetts Department of Children and Families (DCF).
www.foxnews.com/opinion/2014/04/17/my-dinner-with-family-justina-pelletier/