Consultation-liaison psychiatry

Ethics in consultation-liaison (C-L) psychiatry involves the intersection of medical illness and psychiatry. Because it is now clear that psychiatric illnesses and substance use also worsen medical outcomes, the field has broadened to a population level, overlapping with primary care. This brings distributive justice to the fore, as large-scale psychiatric screening requires adequate resources to treat identified populations. Ethical challenges masquerading as psychiatric problems or psychiatric issues masquerading as ethical dilemmas are common. Boundary issues, confidentiality, privacy, multiple loyalties in C-L settings, autonomy, decision-making capacity, and end-of-life conflict are frequent areas of ethical concern for the C-L psychiatrist.

Benefits and Barriers to Professor Transparency

Relationality and attachment to professors play a vital role for those interested in interweaving the relational work of psychology with aspects of faith, meaning, and identity, such as is done in the integration of psychology and religion. The present study investigated student and faculty perceptions of affective presence and transparency at explicitly Christian American Psychological Association (APA)-accredited doctoral programs. A total of 229 students and 51 faculty completed a questionnaire consisting of qualitative questions regarding barriers to transparency, formative experiences, and growth areas. Grounded-theory analysis revealed faculty are thoughtfully considering how to engage in transparency, while also considering boundary issues, power dynamics, and personal fears. Students valued professor transparency and attachment to the professor through mentorship. Implications are discussed surrounding reflective use of transparency, intersectionality, and the importance of cultivating co-regulating classroom environments.

Doing remote systemic psychotherapy during a pandemic

This paper describes some findings from a rapid quality improvement project exploring clinician views about the delivery of remote systemic psychotherapy since the Covid-19 induced UK lockdown. Remote systemic psychotherapy is a practice response based on the need to remain physically distant from people and involves "meeting" via video link rather than in person. Written responses were gathered from early-adopter clinicians in one UK NHS trust, reflecting on their experiences of convening remote systemic psychotherapy sessions during March and April 2020. Overall, findings suggest that that remote systemic psychotherapy has been acceptable, effective and indeed welcomed by clinicians, within the pandemic context. Using a diffractive thematic analysis, four themes were constructed from clinician responses: practical and boundary issues need careful attention; the conversational flow of remote systemic psychotherapy sessions is different to that during in-person sessions; it is necessary to do things differently with words and bodies; the practice of creating meaningful dialogical communication when separated by screens is hard. Tentative practice recommendations are provided.

Testing the applicability of third tone sandhi at the intonation boundary

The purpose of this study is to test the applicability of Tone Three Sandhi (T3S) when the critical syllable is a monosyllabic topic preceding a topic boundary. A recitation task from 37 native speakers of Taiwan Mandarin was employed. The results from human judgements indicated that the participants predominantly produced the critical syllables with Tone 3 (T3). Additionally, the fundamental frequency of the critical syllables demonstrated a falling contour, showing that T3S was not applied. Intonation break-ups and the prolongation of the critical syllables lent strong support to the view that the topic syllable was at an intonation/phonological phrase-final position. The findings can be elegantly accommodated by constraint-based analyses, which propose that T3S must be avoided when two T3 syllables are separated by an intonation/phonological phrase boundary. Issues relating to pauses, speech rates and word frequency effects are also discussed.

Puzzles for pragmatics and rhetoric and advent of pragma-rhetoric

No other interdisciplinary issue has inspired a greater debate than the pragmatics-rhetoric border. This paper explores the pragmatics-rhetoric boundary issues and the possibility of marrying pragmatics to rhetoric for pragma-rhetoric. It first addresses the twenty ‘puzzles’ or predicaments the past studies of pragmatics and rhetoric have met with. It is held that similarities between the two disciplines make ‘pragma-rhetoric’ possible and their differences serve as the conditions for their inter-complementarity. Then we discuss some misunderstandings about pragma-rhetoric integration. Due to the alikeness of speech acts, pragmatic acts and rhetoric acts, we forward ‘pragma-rhetorical act’ (PRA) for an umbrella term in the emerging ‘pragma-rhetoric’. Finally we formulate the academic tasks and features of the interdiscipline, with a ‘standard paradigm’ and two ‘sub-paradigms’ of pragma-rhetorical research.