Salon.com > Politics of Mental Illness

The depressing toll of the Great Recession

Thu, 12 Jan 2012 01:00:00 +0000

In late 2009, as the unemployment rate in San Joaquin County, California, reached 18 percent and one in twelve homes were being foreclosed, two high school students in the town of Ripon, population 15,000, committed suicide within two months of each other. Over the next eighteen months, sixteen more teenagers around the county took their own lives, a not-uncommon occurrence that public health researchers refer to as “suicide contagion.”

Years of declining budgets had cut the number of counselors, nurses and psychologists in county schools, impairing the ability of individual districts to handle the needs of grieving students, parents and communities on their own. So school officials in cities like Ripon, Stockton, Lodi and Linden turned to each other for help.

The districts made use of a mutual aid pact they’d set up, like those employed by firefighters and police from the same region. On the morning after each death, school nurses and counselors trained in suicide response, along with a team of therapists from Valley Community Counseling, a local mental health agency, descended on the school the student had attended. They spent days, sometimes weeks, meeting with pupils and parents, focusing on kids who knew the victims or seemed at particular risk.

NYC officials defend decision to cuff 1st grader

Thu, 21 Apr 2011 12:52:00 +0000

The mother of a special education first-grader wants to know why her son was handcuffed when he became upset while decorating an Easter egg at his New York City school.

Jessica Anderson tells the Daily News that 7-year-old Joseph became upset because his egg-painting didn't look the way he wanted. She says he was taken to the hospital wearing metal handcuffs even though she told the school she was on her way to get him.

Police told the newspaper that the boy was spitting, cursing and acting in a threatening manner. Department of Education spokeswoman Marge Feinberg said school officials tried to defuse the situation but called for help when they became worried he would hurt himself or others.

The incident occurred on April 13 at P.S. 153 in Queens.

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Information from: Daily News, http://www.nydailynews.com

Fanning the flames of paranoia

Thu, 13 Jan 2011 18:18:00 +0000

Like everyone else, in the wake of the killings in Tucson, Ariz., I've been thinking about paranoia. I have worked with the disorder for the whole of my psychiatric career. Early in my residency, at Yale, I was identified as "good with paranoids." I doubt that I began with any special talent. The claim that I did allowed colleagues during residency to avoid these patients and send them my way.

Diagnosis was less critical then, 30-odd years back, but the people I treated probably had paranoid schizophrenia, bipolarity and what is now called delusional disorder, formerly paranoia. My favorite was an annoyed and critical woman who said that CIA agents had damaged her car ignition and then followed her everywhere on the bus, so that she could not travel to see me -- and why should she, since I was probably part of the conspiracy? When the Blizzard of 1978 swept through New England, I was held over at the Connecticut Mental Health Center -- actually, I had managed briefly to get away and had used cross-country skis to return on the empty New Haven streets. At her appointment time, there, all alone, was my beleaguered patient, sitting on the molded Eames chair in the darkened hallway, waiting for her opportunity to give voice to her suspicions.

Why psychiatrists can’t predict mass murderers

Wed, 12 Jan 2011 22:04:00 +0000

The massacre in Tucson, Ariz., has unleashed a barrage of speculation about the sanity and motives of Jared Loughner, charged with mass murder. Some commentators cite the virulent rhetoric of our polarized political climate as an important cause of the violence, whereas others speculate about the role of mental illness. Driving the debate is the hope that we can identify predictors of mass murder, thereby enabling us to intervene early and prevent similar tragedies in the future.

Shocking, unexpected events motivate a search for explanations that would impose order on an otherwise harrowingly capricious world. The British psychologist Frederic Bartlett noted how people exert an "effort after meaning" to make sense of their experience, and this is especially true for seemingly unpredictable and uncontrollable horrors, which are far more traumatic than ones we can foresee and possibly prevent. The search to make sense of the seemingly senseless is entirely reasonable. Yet several cognitive biases of the human mind make the task of predicting mass violence appear easier than it actually is.

Loughner a “textbook” case paranoid schizophrenic

Wed, 12 Jan 2011 01:01:00 +0000

It wasn't long after news of the Tucson, Ariz., tragedy broke that the words "paranoid schizophrenic" entered the conversation. Armchair psychiatrists across the country looked at Jared Loughner -- 22, history of antisocial behavior, with a cache of rambling YouTube videos on government mind control -- and diagnosed him. But is there any truth to this? And if so, how does it help make sense of his horrific actions?

To try and untangle the influences that might lead one lone gunman to fire his Glock at a political rally, we turned to Dr. E. Fuller Torrey, respected psychiatrist and one of the foremost experts on paranoid schizophrenics. Torrey has written several books on the mental illness, including the bestselling classic "Surviving Schizophrenia." He is founder of the Treatment Advocacy Center in Virginia, a national nonprofit for the mentally ill.

Quite early in the news cycle, the media more or less diagnosed Jared Loughner as paranoid schizophrenic. Do you think that's accurate?

My husband brought a knife to a political rally

Tue, 11 Jan 2011 20:10:00 +0000

My husband, Stew, died of cancer three years ago, but he also was severely mentally ill. He was more than depressed, more than anxious, he was occasionally a full-blown psychotic. Over the years he was diagnosed as paranoid schizophrenic, schizo-affective, borderline, bipolar, depressed and with major anxiety.

I've recently seen comments on websites regarding the Arizona shootings: People say the shooter should have gotten help, that his parents should have done something, that something should be done about crazies before a thing like this happens.

As if we hadn't considered that before.

Let me tell you what happened with us. I was already married to Stew when he started becoming mentally ill. It was a slow descent. We kept thinking that he was getting better, or would get better, and when necessary, when he was suicidal, which he was several times before the Great Psychotic Break that led to years of uncertainty and pain, he would even take himself to the hospital. He was good about that, about seeking help. At the time he had a job, and health insurance. He worked for a large health insurance company, so insurance was a given. But what could they do for him at the emergency room? Talk to him, make him promise not to hurt himself, and then send him home again, that's what.