Pacific Standard May-June 2013 Cover

Mentally Ill? Here’s a Bus Ticket

April 15, 2013 • By • Leave a Comment
greyhound-bus

Things are screwed up in Nevada, which you probably already knew because things are screwed up everywhere and especially so in Las Vegas. But this, from today's Sacramento Bee, seems more screwed up than most: Since July 2008, Rawson-Neal Psychiatric Hospital in Las Vegas has transported more than 1,500 patients to other cities via Greyhound bus, sending at least one person to every state in the continental United States, according to a Bee review of bus receipts kept by Nevada's mental health division. In case you missed that: they're busing mentally ill patients across the United ... Read More

More like this: Health
Tags: , , , , , , ,

New Research Suggests Everybody’s Less Satisfied

July 15, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment

Few research papers hit a nerve like the 2009 report The Paradox of Declining Female Happiness. Over the past 35 years, “women’s happiness has declined both absolutely, and relative to men,” Betsey Stevenson and Justin Wolfers wrote in the American Economic Journal. Some interpreted this as an indirect indictment of the feminist movement, which — the argument went — has given women more freedom but left them less content. While that was not the thesis of the paper’s authors, the notion was debated by newspaper columnists ranging from social conservative Ross Douthat to feminists ... Read More

More like this: Culture, Findings
Tags: , , , ,

Mentally Ill Homeless Improve With Group Living

April 22, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment
Homelessness, Housing and Mental Illness

In 1990, a research team in Boston launched an ambitious experiment with some of the city's sickest residents — the chronically homeless and severely mentally ill. With $13 million in federal funding, the team recruited 118 volunteers from the shelters and randomly placed them in group homes and independent apartments. The group homes were envisioned as a kind of utopia, in which the mentally ill clients — up to 10 in each of six homes — would become "active agents in shaping their future." By the end of 18 months, they were supposed to replace the paid staff. The project team, led by ... Read More

More like this: Culture, Culture & Society, May-June 2011, Views Reviews and Interviews
Tags: , , ,

Marijuana Use Hastens Onset of Schizophrenia

March 26, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment

Honing in on the risks of cannabis, scientists have found that marijuana use hastens the onset of schizophrenia by nearly three years for those already at risk for the disorder. In the Archives of General Psychiatry, a team of researchers reports that the onset of psychosis occurs about 2.7 years earlier for people who use marijuana than for those who don’t. And the loss of even 2.7 symptom-free years can worsen a patient’s prognosis for life, they say. “We’ve known for many years that people who develop schizophrenia earlier have a number of poorer outcomes,” said Michael ... Read More

More like this: Health
Tags: , , , , ,

How to Stop Suicide by Cop

February 21, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment

Standing before a classroom of police officers, Lt. Mark Poisson of the Wethersfield, Connecticut Police Department cues up video of a young man talking about the night he tried to get Poisson to kill him. "Seth*," who was 19 at the time and attending college in New Jersey, had already attempted suicide twice. He'd never been in trouble with the law but had spent years crippled by depression, and he was searching for the best way to die. Eventually, he decided the surest method was a gun. But he didn't own one; neither did his parents. That's when it came to him: Police have guns. The ... Read More

More like this: Cover Story, Culture, Health, March-April 2011
Tags: , , , ,

Are More Gun Laws for Mentally Ill Off Target?

January 13, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment

Headlines have reached one consensus about the policy implications of the shooting in Tucson, Ariz., this past weekend. "After Tucson: Why Are The Mentally Ill Still Bearing Arms?" asks Time. "How can we prevent crazy people from getting guns while still protecting the Second Amendment?" poses a lively Yahoo! debate. "Ten Rampages by Mentally Ill People Who Bought Guns That Can Teach Lawmakers What to do Next," blares a Phoenix New Times blog posting. Americans often squirm around these two topics — gun control and mental illness — but have little trouble finding agreement when ... Read More

More like this: Culture, Politics, The Idea Lobby
Tags: , , , ,

A Psychological Autopsy of Bobby Fischer

December 14, 2010 • By • Leave a Comment
A Psychological Autopsy of Bobby Fischer

At a 1958 tournament in Yugoslavia, Mikhail Tal, a legendary attacking grandmaster and one-time world champion, mocked chess prodigy Bobby Fischer for being "cuckoo." Tal's taunting may have been a deliberate attempt to rattle Fischer, then just 15 but already a major force in the highly competitive world of high-level chess. But others from that world — including a number of grandmasters who'd spent time with him — thought Fischer not just eccentric, but deeply troubled. At a tournament in Bulgaria four years later, U.S. grandmaster Robert Byrne suggested that Fischer see a ... Read More

More like this: Culture, Culture & Society, January-February 2011, Miller-McCune Research Essay, Science
Tags: , , ,

Are You Normal or Finally Diagnosed?

June 8, 2010 • By • 3 Comments

"My dear Sir, take any road, you can't go amiss. The whole state is one vast insane asylum." — James L. Petigru Spend just a few minutes watching prime time television with its endless pageant of commercials for antidepressants and anti-anxiety meds and you start to wonder if USA really means the United States of Affliction. Such "direct to consumer" drug advertising ties into one of the most far-reaching criticisms in revising the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders: the potential to transform normal human behavior into a mental disorder. This issue didn't arise ... Read More

More like this: Health
Tags: , ,

Who Benefits? DSM Conflicts of Interest

June 3, 2010 • By • 5 Comments

"There is no such condition as schizophrenia, but the label is a social fact and the social fact a political event." — R.D. Lang As psychopharmacology — using drugs to treat mental disorders — has expanded to dominate psychiatry, so too has the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders' potential to boost the pharmaceutical industry's profits, and in so doing is creating new health problems for some using these meds. Critics say the symbiotic relationship with pharmaceutical companies will only be exacerbated with the upcoming revision of the manual, known as the ... Read More

More like this: Health
Tags: , , ,

Infallibility and Psychiatry’s Bible

May 25, 2010 • By • 9 Comments

"For every ailment under the sun/There is a remedy, or there is none/If there be one, try to find it/If there be none, never mind it." Imagine how easy the practice of psychology would be if we lived in the black-and-white world of Mother Goose. Alas, resolving the many pathologies amid the vast spectrum of human behavior remains in many cases elusive, despite myriad treatments and interventions available today. Still, the path to wellness would be near impossible were it not for the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. This encyclopedia of mental illness, published by ... Read More

More like this: Health
Tags: , ,