Canadian journal of psychiatry. Revue canadienne de psychiatrie
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This study describes characteristics of psychiatry inpatients with developmental disabilities (DD) and their admissions to psychiatry wards in 2 acute care hospitals. It also compares differences in lengths of stay between admissions of this group with a comparison sample of inpatient admissions without DD. ⋯ When individuals with DD are psychiatric inpatients, their length of stay is affected by some factors that have been identified in previous studies not specific to DD (for example, referral source and diagnosis). Our finding that male patients with DD have longer lengths of stay than do female patients in the same sample has not been reported in previous research.
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Case Reports
Treatment resistance in anorexia nervosa and the pervasiveness of ethics in clinical decision making.
Clinical efforts to treat anorexia nervosa (AN) are constantly resisted by patients. Although the primacy of patient autonomy is a cornerstone of modern medical ethics, clinicians will nonetheless often be justified in pursuing particular interventions despite such resistance, give the reduced competency of patients suffering from this multifactorial psychiatric illness. ⋯ Given the fact that treatment resistance is endemic to AN, we see that ethical decision making must also be a continual part of the disorder's treatment. This paper argues that the treatment of AN merely constitutes a particularly clear example of what is in fact a general phenomenon: ethical decision making pervades all clinical practice.