Untreated depression in the community

Aims and MethodReaching into the community to treat people with anxiety and depressive disorders raises the spectre of wrongful use of scarce resources at best, and of disease mongering at worst. We recruited for an internet-based treatment for social phobia.ResultsApplications were received from 789 people, and 205 were rejected because of severe depression or suicidal thoughts. Many were excluded because they had another disorder or were in treatment. Some dropped out, only 7 were subthreshold cases and 291 people with social phobia were treated.Clinical ImplicationsDespite easy access to clinicians, the burden of untreated serious mental disorder in the community remains considerable.

The Ethical Health Lawyer

Health care may be the most regulated industry in the United States, at least in terms of the volume of State and Federal laws and regulations that affect business practices. Lawyers who counsel health care clients often face a dilemma: is the client seeing legitimate advice about the legal limitations on his or her conduct, or is the client seeking to use the lawyer's skills to evade the law? The history of health care fraud prosecutions involving lawyers and other professional advisors in recent years makes this an issue of more than academic interest. The well publicized case of U.S. v. Anderson, in which health care counsel faced charges as co-defendants for purported kickback violations, the recent prosecution of Ernst & Young for allegedly aiding Medicare fraud on behalf of client hospitals, and the recent indictment and conviction of an in-house lawyer in a national durable medical equipment fraud case, make clear that the wrongful use of legal advice by health care clients can lead to significant criminal and civil charges against attorneys.

Burial Fees in the Lycian Sepulchral Inscriptions

The Greek inscriptions of Lycia frequently indicate specific monetary penalties to be imposed upon any person guilty of tomb violation, and a parallel has often been drawn with certain of the indigenous inscriptions which also contain specific monetary sums, expressed as various multiples of the ada. The passages in which ada occurs have generally been thought to indicate penalties directed against wrongful use of a tomb. But this assumption is open to several serious objections, and can now perhaps be discarded in favour of a rather different interpretation, which may cast a new light on the function and purpose of the texts in question.As a general rule, ada is found in a number of short, self-contained statements at the end of the sepulchral inscriptions.

Skinning the Pantomime Horse: Two Early Cases on Limited Liability

The practice of “lifting the veil” from the modern company seems at times to be regarded as a sign that corporate personality is a ficition. This view is hardly logical: if the personality of the company were a ficition, there would be no veil to lift, the liability of the company must be the liability of the members, and limited liability must be an illusion. It is precisely because the legal personality of the company is real that special arrangements must be made for lifting the veil of this personality when it conceals the wrongdoing of a member or director. To use a more florid metaphor, when the powerful hoofs of the pantomime horse are used for improper kicking. Back Legs will be stripped of his protective covering, and made to account for his use of an engine of destruction more powerful than his own boots—on exactly the same principle as if he were made to account for his use of a natural horse's to cause damage. It makes no difference whether he sits on the horse's back or stands inside its skin; and it makes no difference to the man's liability for wrongful use of the horse whether the horse has a legal personality or not. (It may of course make a difference to what the victim does about it, since he may have good reasons for choosing to sue the horse rather than the man.)

Hypatius of Ephesus: A Note on Image Worship in the Sixth Century

In a recent article Professor Norman H. Baynes discussed the evidence for opposition to religious art prior to the outbreak of the Iconoclastic Controversy. In the course of his illuminating article, he called attention to an important fragment of patristic literature which was first published in recent years and which but for Professor Baynes might have remained unnoticed. It is an excerpt taken from the Miscellaneous Enquiries (Συμμικτὰ Zητήματα) by Hypatius of Ephesus, who was archbishop of this most important see from 531 to about 538 and in addition one of Justinian's most trusted theological advisers. Professor Baynes used the text to illustrate the fact that prior to the Iconoclastic Controversy “any general cult of the icons in such extreme forms as later appears in the apologies of the iconodules would seem dangerous and a wrongful use of a practice which was tolerated only in the interest of the weaker members of the church.” (p. 95). The text, however, is also important from other points of view. Since it is difficult Greek and since the trend of Hypatius' thought, though entirely logical, may not be clear at first sight, it is advisable to submit here a translation of the document, accompanied by explanatory notes. The writer gratefully acknowledges that he owes much to Diekamp and Baynes for an understanding of the document.