— Around one in five young people in the U.S. have a current mental, emotional, or behavioral disorder. About half of all adults with mental disorders recalled that their disorders began by their mid-teens and three-quarters by their mid-20s. Early onset of mental health problems have been associated with poor outcomes such as failure to complete high school, increased risk for psychiatric and substance problems, and teen pregnancy.

ZANESVILLE — While the rest of the state is crunching numbers after the release of the Ohio budget earlier this month, mental health officials still are holding their breath. Officials have no idea how much their agencies will receive — or won’t be receiving — because of a possible error made during the budgeting process. Hundreds of millions of dollars set aside for behavioral health and addiction services statewide have been held up because of a dispute over how and how much money was set aside for the Ohio Department of Health.

TRENTON — Hundreds of former patients who have spent years in state psychiatric hospitals will be discharged into community settings under an agreement reached Wednesday between the state Department of Human Services and a disability rights group. The former patients will be discharged over the next five years, as housing becomes available.

A lack of community housing and services is preventing people with mental health problems being discharged from hospital, a survey has suggested.

The typical American lifestyle teems with risk factors for mental illness, says Stephen Ilardi, psychologist at the University of Kansas and author of “The Depression Cure: The 6-Step Program to Beat Depression Without Drugs.” So which are the worst?

A year ago, a study by Rhode Island Hospital and Brown University researchers reported that fewer than half the patients previously diagnosed with bipolar disorder received an actual diagnosis of bipolar disorder after using a comprehensive, psychiatric diagnostic interview tool –the Structured Clinical Interview for DSM-IV (SCID). In this follow-up study, the researchers have determined the actual diagnoses of those patients.

FRAMINGHAM, MA — Area lawmakers who visited MCI-Framingham after an inmate’s suicide said yesterday that mental health cuts did not appear to have played a role but that more prison programs are needed to develop useful skills and give hop

FRANKFORT, Ky. — The state has fired the director of one of its long-term mental health facilities and has launched an investigation into allegations that it failed to report instances of abuse and neglect.

Rancher Dan De Vaul told the Board of Supervisors this morning that “the fight is over” as he and a parade of people he has helped asked the board to find a place for them to stay. County supervisors did not respond. “It was my desire to give them better than they had,” De Vaul said, speaking of the homeless people to whom he has given shelter as well as those who have been through his “Sunny Acres” clean and sober recovery program.

OS ANGELES (AP) — The city attorney stood on the roof of a homeless shelter high above the human misery of Skid Row in April and announced a $1.6 million settlement from a hospital accused of dumping about 150 mentally ill patients on the streets.

Mentally ill and homeless among those city keeps track of.
On the day before Thanksgiving in 1997, Jana Metge left her home in the Phillips neighborhood of south Minneapolis and headed for Iowa. She ate with her parents, slept over for a few days, then returned Sunday. When Metge opened the front door of her lovingly restored home, she faced her worst nightmare: Graffiti marred the walls; feces smeared

Richmond is putting its new jail on a fast track. The city will spend an additional $15 million in the next 11 months to design a new jail on the current site under an accelerated spending plan adopted this week by the City Counci

NEW YORK — New York City is buying one-way plane tickets for homeless families to leave the city. It’s part of a Bloomberg administration program to keep the homeless out of the expensive shelter system, which costs $36,000 a year per family. More than 550 families have left the city since 2007. All it takes is for a relative to agree to take them in.

In the days before Otty Sanchez killed her 4-week-old son and mutilated his body, there were at least two major incidents where her behavior triggered a crisis response by doctors and police. Yet, in each case, Sanchez slipped through the cracks and returned to her baby Scott W. Buchholz Sanchez at a near North Side home, where police said she killed the infant Sunday morning while her mother, sister, and two other young children apparently slept.

If you’re familiar with the writings of former New York Times journalist Melody Petersen, you might know that she released a damning examination of the pharmaceutical industry in 2008 entitled “Our Daily Meds”. I’m currently reading the book, and like many of the reviewers at Amazon.com I’m absolutely in agreement with her simple thesis that drug company marketing bears much of the responsibility for America’s addiction to prescription drugs.

Used to treat bipolar disorder.
Schering-Plough Corp.’s experimental antipsychotic drug asenapine was backed by U.S. regulators, suggesting the medicine will soon be cleared for sale.

Migdalia Soto checked into Lincoln Hospital after suffering a stroke and wound up in the psych ward for days, tranquilized and barely able to speak.

The state Legislature opens all of its sessions with a prayer, which is a terrible thing because it creates among our representatives the illusion that God cares about what they do. God doesn’t. Fortunately for them.

Video report also on website.
It was an end that Danny’s parents, Bobby and Mary Watt of Reston, had struggled to stave off for many years. But after refinancing their house three times to put their son in every substance abuse and mental health program imaginable, after going to countless meetings and hearings and hospitals and jails, after badgering every possible person in Fairfax County who might help them, they could not save Danny.

A group of relatives of Virginia Tech shooting victims asked Gov. Tim Kaine on Tuesday to reopen Virginia’s investigation of the 2007 massacre at the university.

A lawsuit seeking to block the state from closing New Orleans Adolescent Hospital must be moved to East Baton Rouge Parish, an Orleans Parish judge ruled this morning.

The state is changing strategies at its maximum security facility for the insane after efforts made in the wake of a beating death there failed to pass muster

Give a dog a treat, and she just might learn that new trick. Could the same concept also help a human recover from a brain injury, or become a violin virtuoso? Rewards, especially in combination with drugs that enhance the neurotransmitter dopamine, may boost both cognitive and tactile learning, according to research published today in the journal PLoS Biology.

Researchers with the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health in Toronto said Tuesday they are “months away” from being able to personalize medical treatments for mentally ill patients by using genetics and brain imaging tests.

Counter-intuitive in a profession dedicated to disclosure, it was one of the media’s great taboos and to some extent still is. But as the reporting of a spate of teenage suicides in the Victorian city of Geelong has shown, the ground rules on suicide are changing, partly it would appear because the media’s moral compass has shifted, and partly because of the radical changes sweeping over the media landscape.

If you found yourself locked up against your will in a psychiatric ward, you would probably do your best to get out. But in 1969 a group of people did just the opposite — they tried to get in. A young American psychologist called David Rosenhan persuaded seven friends (two psychologists, a psychiatrist, a doctor, a housewife, a painter and a student) to see whether they could convince doctors that they were mentally ill simply by claiming to hear voices. Now previously unpublished notes from Rosenhan’s private archive reveal what the experience was really like.

EVERY COUPLE OF DECADES or so, psychiatrists publish their Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, which functions as the instruction booklet for their profession. The manual always attracts its fair share of mockery, and the last one was no exception.

When Brian Lyttle got word on April 22 from the U.S. Embassy in Guatemala that his brother Mark had been deported to Mexico and bumped around Central America for three months, he was floored.Mark Lyttle was born in Rowan County, N.C., and had never left the United States. He speaks no Spanish and has no Mexican ancestry.

From twisted testicles to babies electrocuted in the womb, Tasers are presenting emergency departments with unprecedented injuries, a paper by a New Zealand doctor shows.

Pinellas County government has not been known for its fiscal restraint, but its recent budgets indicate it is making an effort to cut spending to fit today’s economic realities. Cuts were made in 2008 and 2009, and for 2010, the county and its constitutional offices plan to slash another $78 million and 739 positions. But a few of the cuts go too deep, harming the vulnerable at a time when they most

PORTLAND, Maine (AP) – She was sociable and happy in high school. But in college that changed abruptly: Depressed and withdrawn, some days she couldn’t get out of bed. And that wasn’t all.

A state Superior Court judge and a well-known Anchorage prosecutor are locked in an unusual and bitter legal dispute that has landed before the Alaska Court of Appeals. Hanging in the balance is the future of one of Alaska’s few legally insane killers

If you look closely at some of the most popular comic book and collectible characters featured at Comic-Con International in San Diego, you notice some unexpected similarities. “X-Men’s” Professor Charles Xavier uses a wheelchair. “Daredevil’s” Matt Murdock is blind. “Iron Man’s” Tony Stark doesn’t have a healthy heart.

A woman who had been living in the driveway of a Marana man’s property was arrested Friday and taken to a hospital, authorities said.

Researchers from Rhode Island Hospital’s department of psychiatry propose that the definition for major depressive disorder (MDD) should be shortened to include only the mood and cognitive symptoms that have been part of the definition in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) for the past 35 years. Their recommendation would exclude those symptoms that are currently part of the definition that may be associated with medical illness rather than depression. The proposal is based on a study that appears in the July 23 online first edition of the journal Psychological Medicine.

STOCKTON – Roadblocks keep stalling her journey, but she continues pushing through. Rosalva Garduno isn’t letting anything stop her from reaching the finish line. Her plan is to open a care home for the mentally ill.

COLUMBUS — County mental health officials were somewhat relieved when they learned they were getting back about a third of the $179 million that was supposed to be slashed from their programs in the state budget. But relief has turned to disbelief because, they say, most of the $65 million they looked forward to receiving is “phantom” money — a bureaucratic mirage that will do little to provide mental health services already decimated in the budget signed last week by Gov. Ted Strickland.

For more than four years, Operation Open Arms and its various sponsors and volunteers have put their money where their mouth is when it came to thanking our troops returning from Afghanistan and Iraq. Literally.

Grace Major cites Isaiah 40:35: 3-7

Grace Major has been employed by Good Shepherd Alliance (GSA) since retiring from Safeway Stores in 1998.

Roxanne Dionne is 55 and schizophrenic. She also suffers from lung disease and cirrhosis of the liver. By the time she was 22, she was in the New Hampshire Hospital.

For the last 17 years, Riverbend Community Mental Health in Concord has given Dionne a place to live. The organization has given her a psychiatrist and a case manager, and staff members help her take her medications