Australasian psychiatry : bulletin of Royal Australian and New Zealand College of Psychiatrists
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From July 2004 Tom Calma has been the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Social Justice Commissioner at the Australian Human Rights Commission. This role was created in 1992 to provide an ongoing monitoring agency for the human rights of Indigenous Australians and involves, inter alia, producing the Social Justice Report, an annual account to the Federal parliament on the status of enjoyment and exercise of human rights by Indigenous Australians. Commissioner Calma gave the opening oration to the 2006 Creating Futures conference and returned to open the conference in 2008 on 22 September in St Albans Anglican Church, located in the Aboriginal community of Yarrabah, 60 kilometres from Cairns. This is the text of that speech.
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Australas Psychiatry · Aug 2009
Biography Historical ArticleSoaring on the wings of the wind: Freud, Jews and Judaism.
This paper looks at Freud's Jewish identity in the context of the Jewish experience in Eastern and Central Europe after 1800, using his family history and significant figures in his life as illustration. Sigmund Freud's life as a Jew is deeply paradoxical, if not enigmatic. He mixed almost exclusively with Jews while living all his life in an anti-Semitic environment. Yet he eschewed Jewish ritual, referred to himself as a godless Jew and sought to make his movement acceptable to gentiles. At the end of his life, dismayed by the rising forces of nationalism, he accepted that he was in his heart a Jew "in spite of all efforts to be unprejudiced and impartial". The 18th century Haskalla (Jewish Enlightenment) was a form of rebellion against conformity and a means of escape from shtetl life. In this intense, entirely inward means of intellectual escape and revolt against authority, strongly tinged with sexual morality, we see the same tensions that were to manifest in the publication by a middle-aged Viennese neurologist of a truly revolutionary book to herald the new 20th century: The Interpretation of Dreams. Freud's life and work needs to be understood in the context of fin-de-siecle Vienna. Mitteleuropa, the cultural renaissance of Central Europe, resulted from the emancipation and urbanization of the burgeoning Jewish middle class, who adopted to the cosmopolitan environment more successfully than any other group. In this there is an extreme paradox: the Jewish success in Vienna was a tragedy of success. ⋯ Freud, despite a deliberate attempt to play down his Jewish origins to deflect anti-Semitic attacks, is the most representative Jew of his time and his thinking and work represents the finest manifestation of the Litvak mentality.
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This article aims to describe the process of implementation of the 2004 Indigenous Mental Health Royal Australian and New Zealand College of Psychiatrists (RANZCP) Training By-Laws within Victoria. ⋯ It is likely that the challenges of ensuring access to this training experience, within the Victorian RANZCP Training Program, have been experienced to varying degrees within other Australian training programs. The vertical integration of an Indigenous health curriculum extends work being done in all undergraduate medical schools in Australia and New Zealand, and which the Australian Medical Council has incorporated into the accreditation of medical schools.
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Australas Psychiatry · Feb 2009
ReviewPsychiatrically impaired medical practitioners: better care to reduce harm and life impact, with special reference to impaired psychiatrists.
The aims are to briefly review treatment outcomes for impaired practitioners, and to explore how preventive and early intervention, and the accessing of and retention within treatment systems for impaired medical practitioners, and particularly psychiatrists, could be improved to maximize the doctors' chances of full recovery and to minimize danger to self and others. ⋯ Prevention, early detection, intervention, and treatment programs that are more continuous more sensitive to the needs of impaired practitioners, that are more continuous, better structured, and rehabilitation and recovery focused, may be more likely to produce a positive outcome.
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Australas Psychiatry · Jan 2009
Historical ArticleProfessionalism and psychiatry: past, present, future.
Professionalism is a core component of being a good psychiatrist. In spite of repeated attacks on psychiatry as a profession, the knowledge and skills required to be a professional have increased. Setting standards and having autonomy and self regulation are crucial aspects of professionalism. The attacks on the medical profession have been related to a perception that the profession is inward looking. With changes in the knowledge base and ease of access to information, the relationship between the patient and the clinician needs to be revisited. ⋯ The basic principles of professionalism rely on primacy of patient welfare and patient autonomy. Social justice and a just distribution of finite resources and professional responsibilities need to be redefined. Psychiatry's implicit contract with society needs to be renegotiated for the 21st century.