Online comments about psychiatric neurosurgery and psychopharmacological interventions: Public perceptions and concerns.

The field of biological psychiatry is controversial, with both academics and members of the public questioning the validity and the responsible use of psychiatric technological interventions. The field of neuroethics provides insight into these controversies by examining key themes that characterize specific topics, attitudes, and reasoning tools that people use to evaluate interventions in the brain and mind. This study offers new empirical neuroethical insights into how the public responds to the use and development of psychiatric technological interventions by comparing how the public evaluates pharmacological and neurosurgical psychiatric interventions, in the context of online comments on news media articles about these topics. We analyzed 1142 comments from 108 articles dealing with psychopharmacological and psychiatric neurosurgery interventions on websites of major circulation USA newspapers and magazines published between 2005 and 2015. Personal anecdote, medical professional issues, medicalization, social issues, disadvantages, scientific issues and cautionary realism were among the main themes raised by commenters. The insights derived from the comments can contribute to improving communication between professionals and the public as well as to incorporating the public's views in policy decisions about psychiatric interventions.

Comparison of philosophical concerns between professionals and the public regarding two psychiatric treatments.

BACKGROUND: Psychiatric interventions are a contested area in medicine, not only because of their history of abuses, but also because their therapeutic goal is to affect emotions, thoughts, beliefs, and behaviors that are regarded as pathological. Because psychiatric interventions affect characteristics that seem central to who we are, they raise issues regarding identity, autonomy, and personal responsibility for one's own well-being. Our study addresses two questions: (1) Do the public and academic researchers understand the philosophical stakes of these technologies in the same way? Following from this, (2) to what extent does the specific type of psychiatric technology affect the issues these two groups raise? This study compares how ethical issues regarding neurosurgical and pharmaceutical psychiatric interventions are discussed among the public and in the professional community of academic medicine and bioethics. METHODS: We analyzed (1) online public comments and (2) the medical and bioethics literature, comparing the discussions of pharmacological and neurosurgical interventions in psychiatry in each source. RESULTS: Overall, the public discussed philosophical issues less frequently than academics. For the two types of psychiatric interventions, we found differences between the academic literature and public comments among all themes, except for personal responsibility. CONCLUSIONS: These findings reveal some of the similarities and discrepancies in how philosophical issues associated with psychiatric treatments are discussed in professional circles and among the public. Further research into what causes these discrepancies is crucial.

Zapatista corn: a case study in biocultural innovation.

In November 2001, Nature published a letter in which University of California Berkeley's biologists claimed to have found evidence of genetically modified (GM) DNA in regional varieties of maize in Oaxaca, even though the Mexican government had banned transgenic corn agriculture in 1998. While urban protesters marched against the genetic 'contamination' of Mexican corn by US-based agricultural biotech firms, rural indigenous communities needed a framework for understanding concepts such as GM before they could take action. This article analyzes how the indigenous organization, the Zapatistas, mobilized a program to address this novel entity. Their anti-GM project entailed educating local farmers about genetics, importing genetic testing kits, seed-banking landrace corn and sending seeds to 'solidarity growers' around the world. This article explores material-semiotic translations to explain one of the central aspects of this project, the definition and circulation of Zapatista corn--an entity defined not only through cultural geography, but also technological means. Through its circulation, Zapatista corn serves to perform a biocultural engagement with Zapatista's political project of resistance to neoliberalism. While much has been written about both regulatory policy and consumer activism against GM in the Global North, Zapatista corn also provides a case study in indigenous, anti-GM activism founded on biocultural innovation and the creation of alternative networks for circulating corn.

Biomedicalization and the public sphere: newspaper coverage of health and medicine, 1960s-2000s.

This article examines historical trends in the reporting of health and medicine in The New York Times and Chicago Tribune from the 1960s to the 2000s. It focuses on the extent to which health reporting can be said to have become increasingly politicized, or to have shifted from treating the production of medical knowledge as something belonging to a restricted, specialized sphere, to treating it as a part of the general arena of public debate. We coded a sample of 400 stories from the two newspapers for four different Implied Audiences which health stories can address: Scientific/Professional, Patient/Consumer, Investor and Citizen/Policymaker. Stories were also coded for the origin of the story, the sources cited, the presence of controversy, and the positive or negative representation of biomedical institutions and actors. The data show that through all five decades, news reporting on health and medicine addressed readers as Citizen/Policymakers most often, though Patient/Consumer and Investor-oriented stories increased over time. Biomedical researchers eclipsed individual physicians and public health officials as sources of news, and the sources diversified to include more business sources, civil society organizations and patients and other lay people. The reporting of controversy increased, and portrayals of biomedicine shifted from lopsidedly positive to more mixed. We use these data in pinpointing how media play a constitutive role in the process of "biomedicalization," through which biomedicine has both extended its reach into and become entangled with other spheres of society and of knowledge production.