HARRISBURG – Pennsylvania’s first special court for nonviolent criminal defendants who also happen to be military veterans got up and running in Pittsburgh last fall on the Marine Corps’ birthday.
Since then, veterans’ courts also have begun operating in Scranton and Philadelphia, and next week in Harrisburg a statewide task force will hold its first meeting with the goal of expanding the effort to courthouses across the state.
Phillip Damon Arnold drunkenly hit three Lakewood police cars during a chase that ended with two bullets in his shoulder and another in his cheek.
It also ended with the taxpayers of Lakewood becoming the financial caretakers of Arnold’s medical treatment. The city’s reward for capturing him without injuring bystanders: a hospital bill of $138,000.
Wearing shorts and a T-shirt, the teenager sat on the sofa in his home in Shreveport’s Caddo Heights neighborhood and mumbled under his breath out of anger at his mother. A moment later he yelled at her.
The 13-year-old boy, eyes glassy from lack of sleep and daily regimen of mood stabilizers, is on probation for assaulting a staff member at a local medical facility and hurting a kid. That was the latest of the boy’s violent behavior. At age 5, he set the schoolyard on fire. He’s vandalized a house and cut a girl’s hair.
A bill before the Legislature won’t fix the woeful state of insurance coverage of mental health care in Wisconsin – but it’s a step in the right direction.
AB 512, which would close some of the loopholes in the federal Mental Health Parity and Addiction Equity Act, has bipartisan support. That’s a good sign, but the legislation’s more important accomplishment will be its role in the long, slow project of normalizing and mainstreaming mental health care.
Why is this important?
What if you had grown up in a home where someone had a drinking problem? Drug problem? Untreated mental illness? You were the child of divorced parents? Your mother or father was incarcerated? Both were incarcerated? What if you were sexually and/or physically abused as a child? What if your mother was violent? Your father?
MANATEE COUNTY – Former Army Spc. Travis Pendergrass cannot forget what happened in Iraq, when he and other soldiers fired on a car speeding toward their roadside checkpoint.
Instead of an attacker, it turned out to be a father rushing his family home before curfew. The man’s 8-year-old son and 11-year-old daughter were killed.
Although Pendergrass never saw the dead children, he is haunted by what happened; since returning to the U.S., he has been unable to keep a job and was even arrested.
From the opening scene of HBO’s new biographical film “Temple Grandin,” it’s clear that this will be no misty-eyed memoir.
In it, a slender figure in unflattering blue jeans and a sweetheart-of-the-rodeo button-down gazes at the viewer from inside a checkerboard room that first dwarfs and then crowds her.
“M’name is Temple GRAN-din,” the woman announces. “I’m not like other people. I think in pictures. And I connect them.”
WASHINGTON — Retired Command Sgt. Maj. Samuel Rhodes keeps pictures of the dead in his pockets.
They’re the faces of young soldiers whose eyes stare out resolutely from photocopied pages worn and creased by the ritual of unfolding them, smoothing them flat and refolding them.
They’re the faces of men who, haunted by problems at home or memories of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan — the dead children, the fallen comrades and the lingering smell of burnt flesh — pressed guns to their heads and pulled the triggers or tied ropes with military precision and hanged themselv
Only days after former Gov. Jon S. Corzine signed five bills aimed at improving conditions for New Jersey’s mentally ill residents, recommendations by Gov. Chris Christie’s Transition Team raised concern about future care for patients under state supervision.
Chief among the team’s suggestions was that one of the state’s five psychiatric hospitals be shut down. The Transition Team report did not recommend which hospital should be closed.
AP) — PORTLAND, Ore. – A Portland police officer transferred to work at a property evidence warehouse has filed a whistleblower complaint against the Portland Police Bureau claiming he is being punished for speaking out.
Officer Thomas Brennan said he was worried that his sergeant seemed to be under too much stress while working the streets after his involvement in the controversial police custody death of James P. Chasse Jr.
The death of the mentally ill man in 2006 after his ribs were broken during an arrest resulted in widespread publicity and lawsuits.
Around 10 percent of mentally ill patients at the National Institute of Mental Health are discharged before completing their course of treatment because they cannot afford the inflated costs of hospital beds.
In the last two years, the charge for a hospital bed has almost tripled. In 2008, the cost of a hospital bed per night was Tk 80. Later it increased to Tk 125 and now it costs Tk 225. For a month long stay in hospital, patients now pay Tk 6750 whereas two years ago it cost Tk 2400
Fears about losing status at work and about confidentiality are among the main reasons that many American workers are more hesitant to seek treatment for mental health issues than for physical health problems, according to a national survey released this week by the American Psychiatric Association.
ATLANTA — Georgia’s mental health system is in trouble again with federal authorities, who say seven state psychiatric centers, including Central State Hospital in Milledgeville, remain unsafe and the state must do more to move the mentally ill into outpatient care.
A heroic police officer rescued a suicidal veteran from a burning shed on Jan. 24, according to accounts in The Oregonian.
The incident occurred in the greater Portland area, in Hillsboro. Officer Stephen Beaver was called to the 46-year-old man’s house around 6:30 PM.
What’s the story about gastrointestinal problems in children with autism? I’m wondering about the recent news showing little evidence that special diets do any good.
It’s hard to say when my OCD started, but it was probably when I was 10, the night my aunt died suddenly of an aneurysm. Feeling confused, I found myself running my finger along the patchwork wallpaper in my bedroom — tracing the lines somehow soothed me, so I took it up obsessively. I was worried about my dad, too, and I started to sing his favourite songs. I’d walk round the block so nobody could hear me (I was secretive about my habits), and if I sang a song wrong, I’d have to do it again. When I was 11, my father, a lawyer, got cancer and passed away, and I started praying. I’d pray 100 times (a comforting number) to the Jewish prayer scroll outside my room, and I’d pray throughout the day.
Kevin Kammerdiener’s mother, Leslie, takes care of his every need, which would be fine if he were in preschool.
The thing is, “Kamm” is 21. He suffered a traumatic brain injury, shattered bones and burns on 25% of his body in Afghanistan in May 2008, which left him in a wheelchair, unable to speak and in chronic pain.
WASHINGTON — Alarmed by the suicides of eight soldiers in the year’s first eight days, the Army’s No. 2 general told commanders to have face-to-face contact with GIs to remind them “each one is valued by our Army,” according to the Jan. 8 memorandum provided to USA TODAY.
NEW CASTLE, Pa. — A psychologist who interviewed a 12-year-old Lawrence County boy accused of killing his father’s pregnant fiancee said this morning that the boy is a “strikingly average” pre-teen who would be at “low risk for future violent crimes” if he were tried and found delinquent in juvenile court.
Outdated legislation that requires MPs who have been detained under the Mental Health Act to stand down has been branded ‘untenable’ by the Government, representing the strongest move yet towards outlawing mental health discrimination in Parliament. Section 141 of the Mental Health Act means that MPs have to resign if they are sectioned for more than six months, and the Government has come under considerable pressure this month to repeal the law ‘as soon as practicable’ (1).
It has emerged that people being treated for schizophrenia are more likely than the general population to have encounters with the criminal justice system in the U
Much has changed in Nevada since former U.S. Surgeon General David Satcher announced in July 1999 that suicide is a public health crisis.
Among the most notable additions in Nevada was the Office of Suicide Prevention, which focuses on coordinating suicide prevention grants and the suicide prevention hot line. It had a budget of about $175,000 in 2009, down from $188,000 in 2008, its first year of operation.
It’s no disrespect to observe that 9-year-old Montana Lance was what most parents would characterize as “a handful,” a bright, excitable boy whose impatience sometimes got the best of him.
A sweet-faced kid with a mile-wide grin, he sometimes couldn’t quite manage to rein in his impulsive nature.
Sudden, tragic impulse is the only explanation his shellshocked family can summon for why their little boy, too young to grasp the infinite finality of death, took his own life last week.
The National Institute of Mental Health recognizes two treatments for Post Traumatic Stress Disorder: counseling, and medication.
A Wichita woman proposes a third solution: she says her acupuncture can help people with PTSD.
Two South Bay assemblymen are calling for a state investigation of the San Jose Police Department’s widespread use of force in resisting-arrest cases.
British physician Andrew Wakefield, who claimed links between a common children’s vaccine and autism, failed in his duties and acted against the interest of the children in his care, the General Medical Council ruled Thursday.
“Fraud committed by mental health treatment providers in Georgia’s Medicaid program serves to victimize both the taxpayers as well as those individuals needing additional mental health treatment,” Georgia Attorney General Thurbert Baker said. “My office will continue to work closely with our federal and state partners to ensure that those who target our Medicaid program are themselves the targets of criminal prosecution.”
The state Department of Public Welfare announced Thursday that it is closing Allentown State Hospital by the end of the year, and that up to 65 of its 175 patients would be transferred to Wernersville State Hospital.
ScienceDaily (Jan. 29, 2010) — ADHD, or attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder, is among the costliest of behavioral disorders. Its combination of inattention, impulsivity and hyperactivity leads to accidental injuries, school failure, substance abuse, antisocial behavior and more. Yet despite nearly a century of study, the disorder’s roots remain mysterious.
According to a new study, young children whose parents have bipolar disorder — a mental illness marked by severe mood swings from depression to mania — have an eight-fold higher risk of ADHD relative to young children of mentally healthy parents. They also have a six-fold high risk of having two or more mental disorders.
TOPEKA, Kan. (AP) — Kansas legislators are considering whether to let judges consider a veteran’s diagnosis of post-traumatic stress disorder as a mitigating factor in sentencing.
A bill heard Tuesday by the House Corrections and Juvenile Justice Committee would add PTSD to a list of factors that let judges depart from the Kansas sentencing guidelines
Pennsylvania lawmakers are considering a novel idea to deal with prison overcrowding.
Members of the House Judiciary Committee are looking into the possibility of moving prisoners with mental illnesses into state mental hospitals. Chairman Thomas Caltagirone says that would ease overcrowding and get mentally ill prisoners better treatment.
At 7 a.m. this past Monday morning, my friend Angela (not her real name) walked into the University Health Network on University Avenue in Toronto and took the elevator up to the second floor surgical admissions desk, where she was registered for her first Electroconvulsive Therapy treatment.
Because she has joined a long-term, multi-site Toronto study to examine the hotly debated issue of memory loss and ECT, last week she signed consent papers (routine for anyone choosing to have ECT), had blood work, four hours of tests, including a two-hour MRI of her brain, and a consultation with an anesthesiologist.
Cornton Vale, Scotland’s only jail for women, is overcrowded and run-down with substandard facilities, according to the chief inspector of prisons, who today published one of the most critical reports ever delivered by his department.
Johnson & Johnson has posted a rise in pharmaceutical revenues, while profits have fallen on the back of hefty restructuring charges.
Group net earnings for the fourth quarter were down 18.7% to $2.21 billion, hit by an after-tax restructuring charge of $852 million, although turnover rose 9.0% to $16.55 billion. Worldwide pharmaceutical sales reached $5.99 billion, a rise of 5.4%, a healthy result given the effects of generic competition to key products.
An expert report says prisoners have complained about poor health care in jails and uncaring medical staff, with some inmates washing their fellow ailing detainees.
Even though a new survey shows that nearly two of three Ohioans have a family member or friend affected by mental illness or substance abuse, behavioral care was completely absent from Gov. Ted Strickland’s State of the State speech yesterday.
WINNIPEG’S new human rights museum should focus on stories that never get told – everything from Canada’s involvement in Haiti to the stigma of mental illness and the persecution of Freemasons during the Holocaust.
That was the message that emerged from one of two dozen focus groups gathered at The Forks Tuesday night to hash out what issues ought to form the exhibits in the Canadian Museum for Human Rights.
A mid-year budget deficit of more than $3.1 million has led to the termination of 44 county employees and a reduction of public services as approved by the Board of Supervisors Tuesday.
One hundred sixty Polk County residents have been removed from a waiting list for long-term mental health care that reached record levels last year.
The development is a “good start,” Polk County Supervisor Robert Brownell said. But 490 people with mental disorders or retardation will continue to wait two years or longer for intensive support, such as group home placement, in-home care and job assistance.
