FLORENCE, S.C. – A South Carolina teen admitted to plotting to blow up his high school Wednesday, and prosecutors agreed to ask for a 10-year prison sentence. Ryan Schallenberger, 19, pleaded guilty to receiving and attempting to receive an explosive and attempting to damage and destroy real property by explosive. He could have faced up to 30 years in prison. A judge must approve the sentence at a later hearing. Schallenberger, who was diagnosed with depression and obsessive-compulsive disorder while in jail, smiled broadly and waved at his parents in the courtroom. He takes responsibility for what he did and has taken medication since his diagnosis, defense attorney Bill Nettles said.

WOODSTOCK – A 43-year-old Wonder Lake woman whose pit bull police shot Sunday after it lunged at an officer suffers from bipolar disorder. Pamela Majewski explained that she wanted her mental health providers to adjust her medications as she asked McHenry County Judge Sharon Prather to release her Wednesday on a personal recognizance bond. Prather declined, but reduced her bail from $20,000 to $5,000. Majewski needs to post $500 to be released while her case is pending.

ScienceDaily (Aug. 4, 2009) — A marked and broad expansion in antidepressant treatment occurred among Americans older than 6 years between 1996 and 2005, although treatment rates remain low among racial and ethnic minorities, according to a report in the August issue of
Archives of General Psychiatry.

Clinical Depression, or Major Depressive Disorder, affects over 121 million people worldwide and is the second leading cause of disability (World Health Organization).

Sen. Mary L. Landrieu opened a hearing Tuesday on disaster recovery by praising a series of reports in The Washington Times this week that exposed the mental health crisis gripping post-Hurricane Katrina New Orleans.

SIOUX FALLS, S.D. — Agricultural populations have problems accessing health care services for a number of reasons: rural areas lack qualified health care professionals, and residents face financial constraints and even local stigmas that serve as barriers to getting treatment. These challenges are even more pronounced when residents need to access behavioral or mental health services, experts said here Monday during a conference on rural health care.

NEW YORK (AP) – The mother of the homeless man arrested on charges of causing a bomb scare at LaGuardia Airport says her son has a psychiatric disorder. Margie Jones tells the New York Daily News in Monday’s editions that her son, 32-year-old Scott McGann, suffers from catatonic schizophrenia.

Invega Sustenna (paliperidone palmitate) has been approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to treat schizophrenia, drug maker Janssen said in a news release.

MANCHESTER – Jail isn’t the place to send mentally ill people who commit minor crimes. Perhaps no one knows that better than James O’Mara, superintendent of the Hillsborough County Department of Corrections and head of what is more commonly referred to as Valley Street jail in Manchester. “We’re not a hospital. We’re not a psych ward. We’re not a rehabilitation facility,” O’Mara said. “It’s very important that people go to an environment that’s conducive to their overall health.”

Citing information from a two-day News-Democrat series about conditions at the Tamms supermax prison, an expert on the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq and the military prison camp at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, said today that prisoners at all three locations exhibit symptoms of torture.

SACRAMENTO — A federal judicial panel has ordered California to reduce its prison population by 40,000 to improve treatment of ailing and mentally ill inmates.

NEW YORK Eli Lilly & Co. said Tuesday it is offering buyouts to 4,000 U.S. sales representatives with the hope of eliminating a few hundred jobs. The Indianapolis-based drugmaker also said it plans to restructure its sales operations in diabetes, neuroscience and osteoporosis, giving sales representatives smaller territories to increase their contact with physicians. Eli Lilly did not estimate the costs of the retirement or restructuring packages.

When we first wrote about American Well, a start-up that offers doctor visits over a webcam, a number of the Bits readers suggested that the service seemed well-suited to visits with therapists. The military will soon use American Well to do just that. It will be the first time that online care has been used to deliver mental health services, according to American Well.

DEL CITY, Okla. – There is not enough guilt to go around here, so intent is each woman in Jeffrey Henthorn’s life on owning a piece of the blame. His sister, Shannon Austill, had found him in the living room, laughing at a CD he had brought back from his first combat tour — images of Iraqi adults and children who had been shot, dismembered, burned beyond recognition.

Ryan Yorke, now 21, started taking Paxil after an out-of-the-blue panic attack his freshman year of high school. At first it worked great. But he gained weight and had other problems — he started acting up in school and failing classes, for example. So after a year, he — along with his mother and his psychologist — decided it was time to stop.

Dallas County taxpayers spend about $50 million a year sheltering, treating and jailing the homeless. Perhaps half of that is for the 600 to 1,000 toughest cases – many of whom visit emergency rooms, psychiatric hospitals, jails so often they’re called “frequent fliers.”

Sgt. Jacob Blaylock flipped on the video camera he had set up in a trailer at the Tallil military base, southeast of Baghdad. He lit a cigarette, inhaled deeply, blew the smoke upward. “Hey, it’s Jackie,” he said. “It’s the 20th of April. We go home in six days. I lost two good friends on the 14th. I’m having a hard time dealing with it.”

By the time a teenager graduates high school, about one out of nine of his or her peers has attempted suicide. Suicide is the third leading cause of death among young people, behind car accidents and homicide, and 10% to 12% of teens ponder suicide every day.

The issue: Some pediatricians and mental health professionals believe that many teen suicides can be prevented through a five- to 10-minute questionnaire that singles out at-risk teens for follow-up diagnosis and treatment.

The state agency that serves people with mental retardation and brain injuries might have sidestepped cuts to in-home care if state money and federal stimulus funding had been used differently, say legislators and agency officials.

MONTPELIER — Morgan Brown is candid — but not apologetic — about his circumstances. He’s homeless, living in a tent in the woods in or around Montpelier. He carries his belongings — an extra shirt, underwear, socks, a clock radio, a first-aid kit, and toiletries — in a backpack everywhere he goes. He eats at a church soup kitchen, and snacks on Clif Bars.

The surface of the brain is a complex landscape, featuring endless peaks and valleys. This intricately folded outer layer, known as the cerebral cortex, is one of the brain’s most noticeable features. But it’s also one of the least well understood

James von Brunn, the shooter (do I really need to say “alleged”?) at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum was odd, even by the standards of his kooky peers. White supremacist Stan Hess met von Brunn in 2004. Hess recalled that the creepy von Brunn was “very angry about society and the Jewish influence on the Federal Reserve”. At that time, von Brunn “alluded to violence”; he was a frustrated artist, who spent a lot of time peddling racist conspiracy theories on the Internet.

Adam Lutt is a typical college student: the senior anthropology major has to find a way to balance work, school and his social life. Also, like most students, he doesn’t really have a set plan for how to do that.

TWO YEARS AFTER Seung Hui Cho’s bloody killing spree on the campus of Virginia Tech, the news that his missing mental health records have suddenly turned up at the home of the university’s counseling center’s former director raises a raft of unsettling questions.

Charles Nichols is hardly a counterculture figure, but he spends lots of time around LSD. And, helped along by his father, he favors giving steady doses of the drug — made famous during the ’60s — to a bizarre mix of creatures: rats and fruit flies. And it’s all in the pursuit of knowledge and sanity.

SANDY, Ore. — An out-of-court settlement will give the family of a man shot by police in Sandy $1 million to dismiss a civil suit against the city.

Today in the South Bay, mental health advocates will march and rally against a tiny donut shop that celebrates all things nutty. We’re talking about Campbell’s Psycho Donuts. A small group of people who find the theme offensive are truly “mad” about it.

A court-appointed monitor will track West Virginia’s progress in resolving overcrowding at its public psychiatric hospitals and other problems with mental health care.

LANCASTER -An Ohio budget snafu has Fairfield County mental health and addiction treatment service agencies wondering what services will take a hit. The Fairfield County Alcohol, Drug Addiction and Mental Health Board will be forced to cut $400,000 to $600,000 from its budget because of the mix-up, Executive Director Orman Hall said.

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. “I had really odd thoughts,” recalled the woman, now 21, who asked that her name not be used.

A difference between the brains of psychopaths and ordinary people has been identified in a study that could promise new approaches to diagnosing and treating the disorde

Twice a week — on Tuesdays and Fridays — Victor Neubaum goes to the psychiatric wing of York Hospital to be the arbiter of who stays and who leaves.

A couple years ago, Dr. Stephen Rydesky’s daughter was fired from an executive job with a local bank. She had started acting in ways that didn’t fit her personality: She began dying her hair unusual colors. She designed her own clothes, which became darker and more provocative as time went on. She refused to drive a car. She couldn’t hold a job. Rydesky understood what was going on. The Carroll Township man’s wife suffered from mental illness and killed herself

Three years after closing its doors, the non-profit group that ran the Washington House Treatment Center might have found a new operator.

TAMPA — There are 10,000 homeless people in Hillsborough County. And on any given night, there are 1,500 pillows where they can rest their heads.

“Punishment is a notion that humankind gradually outgrows. A person has done evil, so another person, or a group of people, in order to fight this evil, cannot think of anything better than to create more evil, which they call punishment.

NASHUA – It’s not that Scott Brennan knows how to work the system. It’s that he knows how to make two systems work together like they should.

The call came at 3 a.m., waking Anne Holliday from a deep sleep. It was her son Micah, calling from his apartment, panicked. He was standing in the middle of his living room, naked because he thought his clothes were filthy. He had suffered from severe obsessive-compulsive disorder since he was 11, scrubbing his skin until it was raw.

From the outside, it doesn’t look like a state mental health care facility. It looks like a four-bedroom, two-bath, middle-class, ranch-style brick home in an east Columbus subdivision. Six women can live in the home when it’s filled to capacity. Several years ago, they would still be in a state-run hospital or similar facility because of mental illness and legal issues. There is a similar home for men.

COLUMBIA — As students of all ages prepare to return to class in the coming weeks, law enforcement officers, educators and mental health professionals are preparing to deal with a myriad of possible dangers facing school campuses.