The treatment of psychiatric patients presents significant challenges to the clinical community, and a multidisciplinary approach to diagnosis and management is essential to facilitate optimal care. In particular, the neurosurgical treatment of psychiatric disorders, or “psychosurgery,” has held fascination throughout human history as a potential method of influencing behavior and consciousness. Early evidence of such procedures can be traced to prehistory, and interest flourished in the nineteenth and early twentieth century with greater insight into cerebral functional and anatomic localization. However, any discussion of psychosurgery invariably invokes controversy, as the widespread and indiscriminate use of the transorbital lobotomy in the mid-twentieth century resulted in profound ethical ramifications that persist to this day. The concurrent development of effective psychopharmacological treatments virtually eliminated the need and desire for psychosurgical procedures, and accordingly the research and practice of psychosurgery was dormant, but not forgotten. There has been a recent resurgence of interest for non-ablative therapies, due in part to modern advances in functional and structural neuroimaging and neuromodulation technology. In particular, deep brain stimulation is a promising treatment paradigm with the potential to modulate abnormal pathways and networks implicated in psychiatric disease states. Although there is enthusiasm regarding these recent advancements, it is important to reflect on the scientific, social, and ethical considerations of this controversial field.

Organized persuasive communication is essential to the exercise of power at national and global levels. It has been studied extensively by scholars of public relations, promotional culture and propaganda. There exists, however, considerable confusion and conceptual limitations across these fields: scholars of PR largely focus on what they perceive to be non-manipulative forms of organized persuasive communication; scholars of propaganda focus on manipulative forms but tend either to examine historical cases or non-democratic states; scholars of promotional culture focus on 'salesmanship' in public life. All approaches show minimal conceptual development concerning manipulative organized persuasive communication involving deception, incentivization and coercion. As a consequence, manipulative, propagandistic organized persuasive communication within liberal democracies is a blind spot; it is rarely recognized let alone researched with the result that our understanding and grasp of these activities is stunted. To overcome these limitations, we propose a new conceptual framework that theorizes precisely manipulative forms of persuasion, as well as demarcating what might count as non-manipulative or consensual forms of persuasion.

Noam Chomsky argues that, while the US news media are adversarial towards the US government on foreign policy, institutional filters operate to ensure that the criticisms made generally stay within narrow bounds set by the US political elite. Chomsky's research in this area is largely ignored even by academics who agree with this conclusion. The institutional tendency to filter out anti-elite perspectives applies not only to the news media but also to academia. Consequently, Chomsky's work is marginalised due to its emphasis on corporate power, principled opposition to US foreign policy and the role of academia in buttressing elite power.

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