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This paper has been substantially revised by the Canadian Psychiatric Association's Research Committee and approved for republication by the CPA's Board of Directors on May 3, 2017. The original policy paper1 was developed by the Scientific and Research Affairs Standing Committee and approved by the Board of Directors on November 10, 2008. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper offers an analysis of the events surrounding the suspension of the licence for the widely used sleeping tablet Halcion (triazolam) by the British Licensing Authority in October 1991. It is argued that these events highlight a growing crisis in modern medical treatments and in the social relations of health care. This is illustrated by focusing on four elements which have contributed to Halcion becoming a public issue and to its suspension and subsequent banning, namely the claims-making activities of medical experts, the development of legal challenges to medicine, the role of the media and the response of the state. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article focuses on the subject index of the articles published in this journal. Some of the articles based on health and medicine are "Ethical Language and Themes in News Coverage of Genetic Testing," by David A. Craig, "The "Forgotten" 1918 Influenza Epidemic and Press Portrayal of Public Anxiety," by Janice Hume, "How Newspapers Framed Breast Implants in the 1990s," by Angela Powers and Julie L. Andsager, "Medicine, Media, and Celebrities: News Coverage of Breast Cancer, 1960-1995," by Julia B. Corbett and Motomi Mori.

This article uses coroners’ inquest findings, media such as newspapers, magazines, pamphlets and broadsides, and family correspondence (all drawn from Scotland and the north of England) as well as civil and criminal court records and medical and legal writings from both countries to explore perceptions of the link between state of mind and self-inflicted death. It asks how doctors, lawyers, families and ‘society’ at large conceptualized, responded to and coped with suicide, questioning the extent to which it became medicalized: i.e. consistently linked with mental pathology. The aim is to square the apparently clear-cut, but very different understandings of doctors and lawyers on the one hand and coroners’ inquests on the other with the more emotionally charged and morally complex ways those both close to and distant from attempted or successful suicides related to their situation. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]