Anorexia nervosa is often chronic, with one of the highest death rates for psychological conditions. Law can compel treatment, but is rarely invoked, at least formally (though the strategic possibilities of orders confers internal authority within the clinical setting). Instead, 'control' (or management) is exercised diffusely, through disciplinary practices embedded in everyday clinic life, such as daily routines of eating and washing, behavioural 'contracts', regular surveillance and measuring, interactions with staff, visits and activities.
Brain scientists have succeeded in fooling people into thinking they are inside the body of another person or a plastic dummy. The out-of-body experience - which is surprisingly easy to induce - will help researchers to understand how the human brain constructs a sense of physical self. The research may also lead to practical applications such as more intuitive remote control of robots, treatments for phantom limb pain in amputee patients and possible treatments for anorexia.
Welcome to Jacinta Tan's research website. Jacinta works in the area of ‘empirical psychiatric ethics', researching some areas in the ethics of psychiatry using methods that examine the issue through research amongst people who work and live with the dilemmas. Jacinta Tan has a dual background of medicine as well as philosophy and psychology. She is a Consultant Child and Adolescent Psychiatrist who is also an empirical medical ethics researcher. Her research interests are treatment decision-making in anorexia nervosa, the ethics and law of capacity, the development of autonomy, treatment decision-making models and the ethics of research. What is Medical Ethics? What is Psychiatric Ethics? What is Empirical Ethics Research?
I'm not the only woman who has tried to make herself disappear. Anorexia nervosa, the disorder of pathological self-starvation, is on the rise, with an 80% increase in hospital admissions among teenage girls over the last decade. Pressure groups and parents complain that there is still a chronic shortage of specialist care, with many GPs apparently reluctant to refer patients for treatment in the early stages of the disease. And this approach leaves children and their families to struggle on alone - usually until it is too late for simple intervention.