So much for my good intentions, of keeping the blog up-to-date.
But I have been fairly busy, so that’s my excuse. Writing a blog has not been a high priority compared to preparing medicolegal reports, which sometimes have a tight timescale. And which often involve reading through thousands of pages of clinical records, not that I’m complaining about an important part of my work. This is where I sometimes feel like a detective, (or maybe poacher turned gamekeeper would be more appropriate), keeping an eye out for what is omitted as well as what is present but unexpected or anomalous.
Keeping up-to-date with the field has also been time-consuming. Talking of which, there is a fascinating debate in the British Journal of Psychiatry for May 2018 (pages 269 to 273) between two leaders in the field of suicide research. One is proposing that psychiatric inpatient admission actually causes suicide, the other challenges this proposition with what seem to me to be the more cogent arguments, for example that the highest risk patients are those admitted to hospital.
