The Victorians had many names for depression, and Charles Darwin used them all. There were his “fits” brought on by “excitements,” “flurries” leading to an “uncomfortable palpitation of the heart” and “air fatigues” that triggered his “head symptoms.” In one particularly pitiful letter, written to a specialist in “psychological medicine,” he confessed to “extreme spasmodic daily and nightly flatulence” and “hysterical crying” whenever Emma, his devoted wife, left him alone.
Archive for February, 2010
The torture and slaying of a Greensburg woman has triggered a top-to-bottom review of the mental health system that the victim and at least three of her alleged killers navigated.
Mental health officials said they will comb records from the months and years preceding the slaying of Jennifer Daugherty for clues about whether the system failed and how it could have protected her, said Sherry Anderson, coordinator of Westmoreland County mental health programs.
Kansans would pay a few more cents for every beer or glass of wine to support programs for the disabled and mentally ill under legislation reviewed by state lawmakers today.
It’s late afternoon in the Yorkville apartment. Nicole Anderson has just picked up her son Devin, a first-grader, from the school bus. Her youngest, Kylie, is asleep.
For an hour, Anderson tries to explain to a visitor what her little girl, who once possessed beautiful blond ringlets, has been through since last August. That’s when 2-year-old Kylie Arnold developed primitive neuro ectodermal tumors, a group of cancerous growths in her brain and spinal column.
But conversations are frequently interrupted as Devin bounces around the house and the phone constantly rings.
The tragedy is almost too much for this small town to bear.
Two Interboro High School sophomores – still mourning the death of a 17-year-old classmate – are dead, killed by a high-speed Amtrak train as it barreled through Norwood Borough.
Too sad, too gruesome.
EDWARDSVILLE – Judges and social services workers long have been concerned about the “revolving door of justice,” but many insist that the treatment available in “diversion courts” can at least slow the door down, reduce the cost and improve the quality.
Mental illness takes on a variety of forms. You can often see it in the homeless and, believe me, I have seen it and still do, since I was at ground zero for a year.
When you come face to face with those variations, such as clinical depression — or worse, schizophrenia — you see in many of these people that haunted look that signals all is not right.
MOUNT CURRIE, British Columbia — Bruce Edmonds was a rising leader in this native reserve set beneath craggy, snowcapped peaks, and he had a gift that Olympic organizers wanted to showcase for the world.
One of the most powerful men in a community of about 2,000, he was also an artist, talented enough to be commissioned to carve the pale-gold cedar doors for the athletes’ lodge at Olympic Park in Whistler.
But on a cloudy afternoon three days before the opening ceremony, Edmonds drove his truck up to the woodlands overlooking his community, pointed a hunting gun beneath his rib cage, and shot himself to death.
A Corrections guard attacked by a mentally ill inmate in 2005 is suing the company that provided health care services to prisons statewide at the time, alleging the firm denied the inmate prescription medications meant to control his penchant for violent outbursts.
The Maine Legislature is considering a bill to require constitutional safeguards when prisoners are relegated to solitary confinement — Maine’s segregation unit certainly qualifies as solitary confinement — and to preclude solitary confinement for prisoners suffering from serious mental illness. It is groundbreaking legislation and goes a long way to correct a historic wrong turn in corrections.
Allison, Ia. – Jurors in Mark Becker’s murder trial asked a district court judge Friday what would happen if they declare the defendant legally insane.
The note to Judge Stephen P. Carroll, sent Friday afternoon, suggests that jurors are trying to factor the 24-year-old’s fate into their decision.
“What would happen to Mark Becker if we find him legally insane?” the note reads, according to a court filing in Butler County District Court.
Tony Stephan’s life was coming unglued.
In 1994, the 40-year-old engineer from Cardston, Alta., thought his 210-pound teenage son might kill him.
Joseph, 15, had been diagnosed with bipolar disorder and although medicated had violent mood swings. Once a gentle giant of a kid, he would explode into violent rages.
“He assaulted my wife. We were all afraid for our lives,” Stephan said in an interview. “My son was insane.”
TACOMA, Wash. — The stalking began with bursts of phone calls — 10 or 15 in a day, about once a year, from an old college acquaintance. Then, flowers and unwanted visits, an anti-harassment order, an arrest — and bail.
Jennifer Paulson, a 30-year-old special education teacher at a Tacoma elementary school, knew she was in danger this week when her alleged stalker was released from the Pierce County Jail, three days after she had him arrested. She started staying away from her home in an attempt to avoid him.
Peter De Vries, America’s wittiest novelist, died 17 years ago, but his discernment of this country’s cultural foibles still amazes. In a 1983 novel, he spotted the tendency of America’s therapeutic culture to medicalize character flaws:
An Elkhart man on whom police used a stun gun in January died as a result of his delirious state and police force, according to an autopsy report released Thursday.
SIOUX FALLS, SD – The homeless are everywhere, in nearly every U.S. community, living with friends, family, or in shelters. But there’s a different kind of need that’s growing by the day. They’re not kids, but they’re not adults either; they’re somewhere in between, and they’re often called the “hidden homeless.”
MUSCATINE, Iowa – When Anna Cavazos graduated from Muscatine High School in 1993, she thought she had her life all planned out.
After taking summer classes at the University of Iowa, she headed off to Western Illinois University where she was majoring in English literature with a minor in education.
During the fall of 1994, as she was beginning her sophomore year in college, mental illness hit and changed the course of her life.
LAST WEEK, my 15-month-old son got his Pentacel shot, which contains vaccines for diphtheria, tetanus, whooping cough, polio, and a form of influenza that can cause bacterial meningitis. By rights, I should have felt relieved: He’s now protected from a pack of dread diseases. But I was nervous for days, watching his every move. Was he still making eye contact? Saying “Hi, Dada’’? Or was this the moment he’d slip away?
Maybe I’ve read too many stories about parents like Doug Flutie, who swears that his child was normal, got some shots, and changed. But I know that few things strike terror into parents’ hearts like the dramatic increase in autism diagnoses, now estimated at one in 100 American children.
To flip through the latest draft of the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, in the works for seven years now, is to see the discipline’s floundering writ large. Psychiatry seems to have lost its way in a forest of poorly verified diagnoses and ineffectual medications. Patients who seek psychiatric help today for mood disorders stand a good chance of being diagnosed with a disease that doesn’t exist and treated with a medication little more effective than a placebo.
(CBS) Former Army medic Jeremy Smith was wounded and paralyzed in Afghanistan. Clearly qualified for both medical and pension benefits, Smith was surprised when a Veteran’s Affairs counselor told him he wasn’t disabled enough for vocational benefits.
The horror of the recent shooting rampages at Deer Creek Middle School and the University of Alabama brings a sense of déjà vu for many of us reading about the alleged shooters. Like others believe to be involved in recent tragedies, such as the November Fort Hood shooting, each apparently had a history filled with signs of mental illness.
Spending time in today’s hospitals can have many downsides.
Although it seems counterintuitive, hospitalizations are linked to a host of medical errors and unintended consequences, including nosocomial (hospital-acquired) infection and, as discovered by new research, acute cognitive decline.
A paper in the current issue of JAMA reviews how older patients hospitalized for acute care or a critical illness are more likely to experience cognitive decline compared to older adults who are not hospitalized.
Attorney General Steve Bullock announced Thursday that he has settled a lawsuit with a major pharmaceutical company.
Bulllock’s office filed a suit against pharmaceutical giant Eli Lilly in 2007 on behalf of the citizens of Montana. Eli Lilly marketed and sold the drug Zyprexa for unapproved uses and failed to warn physicians of these dangers.
Today, Bullock announced the money won in the settlement will be used in the Montana Mental Health trust. He said the lawsuit was settled for 13 million dollars and that the Montana Mental Health Trust will receive 9.5 million dollars.
PARIS — France’s National Assembly approved Thursday night a proposal to add “psychological violence” to a law intended to help victims of physical violence and abuse, despite doubts that the law is specific enough to have much impact.
uch has already been written about Shutter Island, but my perspective may be a bit different because the film reminded me of my own state of mind years ago, in 1999, when I was having my second psychotic break.
Like Leonardo DiCaprio’s federal marshal, I too once sensed that every subtle wink, nod or gaze from the patients, orderlies or doctors at a psychiatric ward could mean a conspiracy at work.
My psychosis did not involve the Nazis or the House Un-American Activities Committee, two preoccupations of DiCaprio’s character, but it did take on a political dimension. I feared that I would be blamed for the failure of the Israeli-Palestinian peace process and believed that President Clinton, who was in the process of being impeached, was one of the few people who could save m
Reporting from San Francisco and Los Angeles – The executive director of Napa State Hospital, a Northern California mental institution that houses mentally ill criminals, was arrested Wednesday on suspicion of molesting his adopted son for more than a decade, authorities said.
ASHEVILLE — As the person in charge of Buncombe County’s jail health system, Rich Munger isn’t necessarily joking when he refers to the detention center as “probably the biggest mental institution in the county.”
On any given day, Munger said, there are 75 people with mental health issues among the jail’s 400 inmates, a figure that advocates say could grow as the state struggles with budget cuts and mental health reform.
“It gets to be very expensive for counties to house people with mental illness who don’t need to be there, and it is not very useful or helpful to the person with mental illness,” said Bob Kurtz, program manager for the state division of mental health.
I’m a taxpayer and a voting citizen and in my 83rd year of life. It appears we are in a depression, with many, many locals out of work, and yet the county commissioners want to spend millions for a new jail facility–and preceded by hundreds of thousands of dollars of study.
School shootings across the United States in recent years have been shocking and can cause long-lasting effects in children. Today’s shooting in Littleton, CO (at the Deer Creek School) is no exception.
The phenomenon known as “suicide by cop” has taken center stage at the trial of a Philadelphia man accused of attempting to kill an Abington police officer during a domestic disturbance.
Leon Pedro Bailado, through his lawyer Gabriel Z. Levin, argued to a Montgomery County jury that he didn’t fire a .45-caliber handgun with the intent to kill Abington Police Officer Robert Davis, but instead wanted police to shoot and kill him.
Federal investigators have slammed Oregon State Hospital again, citing “alarming” failures in care for a patient who died at the Salem psychiatric facility in October.
The U.S. Department of Justice found numerous flaws and failings in hospital care provided to Moises Perez during the year before his death, documents obtained by the Statesman Journal show.
On the day Moises Perez died in his bed at the Oregon State Hospital, the 42-year-old mental patient missed lunch and dinner.
That should have drawn attention from his hospital caretakers but reportedly didn’t.
“Despite his documented eating habits, including never missing a meal, no staff checked on his well-being,” a U.S. Department of Justice official wrote in a recent letter to the state.
Amarillo psychiatrist Michael Jenkins had a troublesome patient with severe depression who wasn’t responding to medication.
The patient, in his early 20s, hadn’t left his house in a year.
Then Jenkins provided a form of therapy new to Amarillo, in which short magnetic pulses are delivered to the part of the brain that controls mood.
Michael Cronin was behind the wheel several years ago and knew then he would either drive his car into a tree to end his life or get help.
Cronin got help. At 3 a.m., he checked himself into a hospital. He was diagnosed with bipolar disorder (or manic-depressive disorder), which is marked by periods of excitability (mania) alternating with periods of depression.
CROWN POINT — Lake County Sheriff Roy Dominguez will have to defend his department from charges in a handwritten lawsuit scrawled by convicted murderer and rapist Mark Stephen Erler, a federal judge ruled.
Erler, who pleaded guilty but mentally ill to the 1984 rape and murder of Linda Lee Bennitt in April, filed a lengthy complaint in federal court against Dominguez, and Robert Malizzo and Danita Johnson Hughes, who ran the jail’s medical and mental health services.
His name is John, and he has what he calls an “addictions problem.” It cost him his carpet-laying job at a swank new hotel and condominium development downtown. “I showed up wasted,” he says. “I didn’t get paid and I lost my apartment, and now I’m here.”
Here being the Downtown Eastside, Vancouver’s slum. Where, on Monday night, John wound up. He spent what little cash he had and got wasted again. He’s not feeling sorry for himself or making excuses. “I wrote my own story,” he says. “It’s my fault.”
DALLAS— The Texas Youth Commission is seeking to ensure better care and supervision for mentally ill juvenile offenders it must release under a state law.
An emergency measure adopted by the commission last month requires every offender discharged under the law to receive court-ordered psychiatric treatment. It also states that no such releases can be made without the approval of Executive Director Cherie Townsend.
The 2010 Georgia General Assembly must support a new strategic direction for the state mental health programs.
Last year, legislators created a new Department of Behavioral Health and Developmental Disabilities. In 2008, the state agreed with the U.S. Justice Department to address the dangerous conditions in its psychiatric hospitals and agreed with the Civil Rights Division of the Centers for Medical Services to enable persons with disabilities to leave institutions and live in the community (the Olmstead plan).
With Canadian Olympians in spotlight, a former gold medalist is gathering attention to highlight ADHD, a stigmatized disorder, in a positive way.
Adam Kreek, who reached his height in men’s eight rowing at the Beijing Games in 2008 said, “I found that the disorder isn’t negative infliction but it gives positive energy as well.”
“If you want to know where they are all being kept,” said Todd Winstrom, “they’re down in the hole.”
Winstrom, a staff attorney for Disability Rights Wisconsin, was talking about what happens to mentally ill offenders when they enter his state’s prison system. Without treatment options–and without anyplace else to put them–these prisoners quickly end up in solitary confinement, where they may remain for months or years.