A major speech on mental health from Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Kathleen Sebelius and the ascension of a new administrator at the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA) have sparked hopes that the Obama administration is putting increased emphasis on mental health issues. Buoying those hopes further is the fact that the White House has recruited notable mental health advocates in other top positions, such as Richard G. Frank and Sherry A. Glied, authors of the book Better But Not Well: Mental Health Policy in the United States Since 1950. Glied has been nominated as assistant secretary for planning and evaluation at the HHS. Frank is her deputy for disability and mental health policy.
Emory University graduate student Meredith Philyaw plans to put up a clothesline in the middle of campus.
Next, she’ll hand out pieces of paper for students to jot down their fears and pressures. Then she’ll hang those confessions on the line for the world to see.
It’s all part of an exercise meant to point out just how much stress and anxiety are a part of the college life experience.
Thirty years ago I began working with children impacted by addiction in their family. Addiction in the family is a legacy that continues to thrive, although today we have a much better understanding of how children are influenced when raised with the chaos and fear that permeate an addictive family.
Virginian-Pilot: Area hospitals are preparing “for a round of Medicaid spending cuts that executives say could be the worst in decades and lead to more cutbacks in their organizations. Rising health care costs and a surge in the number of Medicaid patients have increased the state’s obligation to the government health insurance program for the poor and disabled by $777.7 million over two years. The state also must find $1.2 billion to replace stimulus money that the federal government provided last year to help Virginia cope with rising health care demands and declining state revenue. That funding stops at the end of this year.” Former Gov. Timothy M. Kaine recommended in his budget proposal that Medicaid payment rates for hospitals be frozen. The General Assembly is trying to set a budget that deals with that as well as absorb a $1.9 billion shortfall in state revenues (Jeter, 2/8).
Paying drug addicts to be sterilised is exploitative and wrong, say critics of just such a scheme that runs in the US. Jane Beresford talks to the woman behind Project Prevention.
If you call Project Prevention’s helpline it’s likely that Barbara Harris, the founder of this US based organisation, will answer the phone. A warm and vivacious grandmother, her aim is to give $300 to as many drug and alcohol addicted women as possible.
A district judge has said mental health sufferers are not adequately dealt with by the court and called for the future justice minister to take urgent action.
According to many, the United States is experiencing its worst recession since the Great Depression. Nationwide, cuts to mental illness treatment services are the most extensive they have been in the last 30 years. Montana is also beginning to experience budget deficits.
While politicians and public officials publicly assure us there have not been budget cuts to mental health services, mental health providers tell their clients cuts to mental illness treatment are imminent. I have received calls from individuals suffering from severe mental illness who are extremely anxious about their future.
We don’t want to see it, touch it or talk about it. We hope it slinks away and hides in some deep, dark hole.
That’s mental illness.
“It really is the leprosy of this era,” says Marnie Wedlake, mental health educator with the London-Middlesex branch of the Canadian Mental Health Association. “You’d almost be better off having a big red letter A on your forehead.”
It seems only formalities stand between Cache County schools and their first student mental health policy.
After hearing a draft policy during last week’s school board meeting, Superintendent Steve Norton said he doesn’t think there is any question about whether it will be approved.
“We’ve been wanting to do something like this for a long time,” he said.
The prestigious British medical journal Lancet took a rare step this week: It retracted a 1998 paper that sparked a firestorm about potential links between vaccines and autism. That paper has been a bane to Dr. Paul Offit, co-inventor of the rotavirus vaccine and chief of infectious diseases at Children’s Hospital in Philadelphia. Offit tells host Guy Raz why he thinks the paper was a disaster for parents seeking answers about autism.
ZURICH—Daniel Gall, a French actor, was skeptical when his sister and her husband told him two years ago that they wanted to commit suicide. Genevieve Gall-Peninou was 81 and said she could no longer bear the Alzheimer’s Disease she had suffered for several years. Yves Peninou, 86, didn’t want to live without her.
WOBURN – Prosecutors in the case of a teenager charged with fatally stabbing another student at a high school are asking a judge to allow them to use jailhouse recordings of the teen’s conversations with his parents at his upcoming trial. John Odgren’s lawyers contend he was legally insane when he randomly chose a victim at Lincoln-Sudbury High School and stabbed him repeatedly in a boys’ bathroom. James Alenson, 15, died in the 2007 attack. Prosecutors said jailhouse recordings of Odgren’s conversations with his parents show a lucid boy who was not in the throes of mental illness.
Tennessee’s mental health agency, already struggling from last year’s budget cuts, is facing a double whammy in 2010 — deeper cuts to its own budget coupled with reductions in TennCare insurance for many of its patients.
Advocates for the mentally ill say more reductions in services may endanger lives.
LONG BEACH — As the unemployment rate goes up, finding jobs for disabled people is getting harder.
Nonprofit organizations that help the disabled find work are spending more time and effort than ever and have little to show for it, officials said.
For more than a decade, a debate has raged whether there is a connection between autism and the three-in-one measles, mumps and rubella vaccine, commonly known as the MMR.
The story hit like a punch to the gut.
Montana Lance, a 9-year-old with a toothy grin and a love of anything mechanical, had apparently committed suicide in a restroom at his elementary school in The Colony.
And in homes across North Texas, people wondered how that could even be possible. Why would a 9-year-old take his own life? How would a child that age even know about suicide?
Having a close friend or two to talk to—someone on whom you can depend for emotional support—can be great when little things accumulate or you temporarily feel down in the dumps. But can a friend talk you out of depression or lessen its pernicious effects? A study recently published in the British Journal of Psychiatry examined the viability of “befriending” as a tool in the treatment of emotional distress and depressive symptoms. The findings suggest that friendships, even therapeutic ones, can’t necessarily substitute for treatment.
Four LMPD officers are on administrative leave for firing their weapons at a suspect killing him last night but police aren’t the only ones asking questions.
Police say an officer was responding to a “trouble call” in the 1500 block of Oneida Court.
The former head of the British Army has warned of hundreds of undiagnosed victims of mental trauma from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
WORCESTER — Jesse Grenier had a rough childhood.
He’d never met his father, and his mother was a junkie. The state Department of Children and Families removed him from the home when he was 14, and he went from foster home to foster home
BERLIN – Almost all the people who pass through Central Vermont Medical Center behave themselves, but an increasing number are being aggressive and violent toward hospital staff, according to the hospital’s top administrator.
The increase in aggressive behavior in recent months has prompted hospital leaders to consider beefing up security by adding in-house security staff, more surveillance cameras and rooms where they can seclude disruptive people.
Some black and ethnic minority groups are three times more likely to be admitted to mental health services.
But despite this health workers are worried that many people from some ethnic communities are not accessing the help they need.
Language barriers are blamed, as is a belief in certain cultures that mental health issues should not be talked about outside the family.
Raju Mehta was one who suffered from such stigma.
Dr Elvin Semrad was a much-loved psychiatrist and psychotherapy supervisor who had a profound influence on hundreds of psychotherapists and psychoanalysts in the Boston area. One of his unique qualities was his ability to connect empathically with even the most psychotic patients. He supervised at Boston State Hospital and then for 4 decades at the Massachusetts Mental Health Center (MMHC) in Boston, where he conveyed his strong conviction that psychotic and other seriously mentally ill patients could benefit from long-term psychoanalytically oriented psychotherapy.
WEST PALM BEACH — Johnny B. Goode, the homeless, mentally ill man with the hard-to-miss name, was back in jail today.
Early this morning, court officials said, he walked away from a residential mental health center in Palm Beach County and was almost immediately picked up by authorities on four warrants for failing to appear in court on early trespassing arrests.
Virginia Governor Bob McDonnell today announced the launch of a $2 million public/private initiative to provide mental health treatment through the Virginia Health Care Foundation. Today’s announcement is the result of a $2 million challenge grant McDonnell made one year ago while Attorney General of Virginia. The launch of the VHCF’s program, “A New Lease on Life,” will provide mental health care to uninsured Virginians all across the Commonwealth.
Continuing department controversy over the use of Tasers has not dampened the Minneapolis police’s conviction that the electronic “stun guns” are the best way to subdue violent suspects.
Indeed, the department still hopes to find the money to implement a 2007 plan to equip most of its officers with the devices, which it says sharply reduce the number of injuries to police and suspects alike.
DOWNTOWN – He goes by the name of Madness and police have issued a nationwide warrant for his arrest after a mentally ill, sometimes homeless, man had to be placed into a medically induced coma at University Hospital following an attack.
Larisa Belekova spent her life serving society’s forgotten and her death should remind everyone of the need to better fund homes for the mentally ill, her employer says.
“There is a story within a story here,” Dara Residence owner Allan Jones said Thursday. “It is amazing (the work she did) with the little resources we have.
“It should not be in vain.”
Man Convicted 33 Years Ago Exonerated Through DNA – 13WHAM.com – Rochester News, Weather, and Sports
Rochester, N.Y. – Thirty-three years after his wrongful conviction and 28 years after he was released on parole, Freddie Peacock, 60, has been exonerated with DNA testing at a Thursday hearing in Rochester.
SPOKANE – The family of a man who jumped off the Monroe Street Bridge to his death has filed a $1.7 claim against the City of Spokane.
The hill is steep, the path long and winding.
It is 8 p.m. on a weeknight in East Austin, and a dozen of us are stomping around the woods, looking for homeless people. We think there may be some living along this path off Riverside Drive, so up and up we go, hoping to find someone at the top.
This is the 2010 Austin Travis County Homeless Count, a five-hour event where volunteers canvass parks, campsites and other public spaces to calculate the number of unsheltered people in the area.
A Mexican church in the central city of Queretaro has opened a chapel in which exorcisms can take place.
There are no accurate figures for the number of exorcisms in Mexico.
But the Roman Catholic Church says that in Mexico City alone there are about 10 cases a month – and the phenomenon is on the rise.
Critics say that priests often mistake mental illness or epilepsy for signs of possession. The new church will only treat people already seen by doctors.
About a third of all Iowa prison inmates are clinically diagnosed with mental illness – the figure is closer to 60 percent for women inmates. It is fair to say that many of them would not be in prison but for the lack of better mental-health treatment alternatives. But Department of Corrections officials are resigned to the fact that in addition to housing and rehabilitating criminal offenders, they are running treatment programs for men and women afflicted with mental problems and/or drug and alcohol addictions.
Indeed, because of this reality, Iowa’s prison system may well be a national model for mental-health treatment.
February 6, 2010 (CHICAGO) — Illinois taxpayers spend more than $122 million a year to care for the mentally ill in privately run, for-profit nursing homes — a system largely rejected elsewhere over costs, concerns about residents’ rights and quality of care.
Last year’s deep cuts in state funding for mental health services, coupled with similar cuts the previous year have devastated Illinois’ already weak mental health system. Fortunately there is a solution within easy reach.
Illinois leads the nation in the number of people with mental illness confined to nursing homes. This is often bad for elderly nursing home residents as well as for people with mental illness.
Federal health care authorities on Friday moved to terminate funding to the troubled Somerset Place nursing home in Uptown, saying in court filings that systemic violence, abuse and mistreatment put “the health and safety of … residents in immediate jeopardy.”
When Fairfax Commonwealth’s Attorney Raymond F. Morrogh announced on Jan. 27 that his office would not file charges in the death of David A. Masters, shot by a still-unnamed county police officer, he offered this stunning summary of what happened:
“Unfortunately, we had a mentally ill man who was behaving bizarrely,” Morrogh said. “His family indicated he was behaving under delusions, that he might feel he was under attack if approached by the police. I think that’s the explanation for his actions.”
Morrogh’s speculative statement connects Masters’s mental illness to his actions immediately prior to the shooting, making this appear to be yet another tragic story about a “mentally ill man” who became delusional, paranoid and dangerous, and ended up being shot by the police. But this isn’t something that can be determined based on the evidence, something a prosecutor in particular ought to adhere to — especially when he’s justifying the police shooting of an unarmed man.
The Los Angeles County Department of Children and Family Services will suspend efforts to reduce the number of children in foster homes following the deaths of several children who were under its care, department officials said Thursday.
SALT LAKE CITY — In Utah, those with mental illness used to be referred to as “the feeble-minded” or “mentally defective.”
Today, the University of Utah’s School of Medicine fosters one of the most progressive psychiatric programs in the country.
These days, 29-year-old Leah Hess has a part-time filing job in an office, spends her spare time taking aboriginal drumming lessons, and, according to her mother, Susan, is “an amazing young woman with a great sense of humour.”
But raising Leah, a developmentally delayed young woman who has also suffered from chronic depression and an anxiety disorder since childhood, was a long and difficult process, Susan said.