September 28, 2026

Photo credit: Phil Fisk / Connect Images via Getty Images

Mental-health practitioners and academic researchers increasingly use terms like “secondary traumatic stress” and “vicarious trauma” to describe the strain of caring for those who have experienced trauma. The terminology is even on the rise in other professions. “Teachers can acquire secondary trauma from students. Journalists can experience vicarious trauma from reporting on suffering,” writes Christina Buttons.

Expanding the concept of trauma could make clinicians less willing to treat the psychiatric patients most in need of help, worsening existing workforce shortages in mental-health facilities.

“If exposure to other people’s trauma is itself treated as potentially harmful to the clinician, then difficult patients can be seen as a threat to a clinician’s own well-being,” Buttons writes.

Read more here.

Collin May served for three years on the Alberta Human Rights Commission—until activists discovered an article he had written 13 years earlier.

He had reviewed Efraim Karsh’s Islamic Imperialism, and critics were not pleased, accusing May of hate speech and Islamophobia. Muslim groups, and eventually Alberta’s justice minister, demanded that he resign, and the government rescinded his appointment.

Now, May has written a book about the experience: From Cancel Culture to Incarceration Culture. “May thinks cancel culture has morphed into something more pernicious,” Ilya Shapiro writes. “Once regulators, tribunals, and prosecutors start policing ideological deviations, the consequences become considerably more serious than social-media shaming.”

Read Shapiro’s review.

In 1963, the Supreme Court ruled in Brady v. Maryland that prosecutors must disclose potential integrity issues concerning government witnesses like police officers. So prosecutors began making lists of related misconduct, now known as Brady lists, to help them stay on top of any witness issues.

Ending up on a Brady list can be career-ending. “You aren’t much use as a police officer if you can’t go to court,” Sean Kennedy and Jason Johnson explain. They examined the policies of 50 prosecutors’ offices and found that getting on or off a Brady list is a black box. “Officers can be listed based on unproven allegations, on the say-so of a single prosecutor, without being told why, and with no means to appeal a Brady designation,” they write. Only 11 states have laws regulating the lists, and most fail to grant due-process rights to officers.

Read more.