This does not look good…

The Series: America’s mental health: a crisis in care…

[T]he essential first step of looking for a therapist is not as simple as picking and choosing from dozens of insurance company-trusted doctors.

Private insurers are known for providing listings of in-network therapists that include mental health clinicians who are, for any number of other reasons, not available to provide treatment in the location at which they’re listed: some have moved, others retired; in rare cases, they’re still on the list even after they’ve died. These so-called “phantom networks” of mental health professionals mean that finding an in-network therapist can involve a process of rejection and confusion that may last for days or even weeks.

“If a lot of the psychologists and other mental health professionals leave the network, patients can’t find the care,” says Alan Nessman, senior special counsel at the American Psychological Association. “It saves the company in not only paying lower rates, if people can’t access care, that really saves the company money and is terrible for the mental health consumers.”

Psychiatrists are, increasingly, leaving the insurance networks – all of them – and deciding to accept cash only. A December 2013 study showed that 55.3% of psychiatrists take insurance, compared to 88.7% of other doctors.

A key part of this trend is the influence insurance companies wield over mental health care, an influence that leads therapists to consider not accepting insurance so they can operate in an environment that offers more money for less hassle.

Amanda Holpuch writing in Talking about mental health: ‘So much of this is behind closed doors’ for The Guardian.

I’m hopeful that video of today’s events will be available shortly, but until then, here’s a brief video–a teaser for the documentary Saving The Snyder–from a previous return home.

The Series: America’s mental health: a crisis in care…

the man running the largest mental health institution in the United States is not a doctor. He did not major in psychiatry, nor did he spend his formative years studying bipolar disorder or working with schizophrenics.

That man is me, a history major turned lawyer who went on to become the sheriff here. As sheriff, I run the Cook County Jail, the largest jail on a single site in the country with approximately 10,000 inmates on any given day – and approximately 30% of them suffering from a serious mental illness.

With dramatic and continued cuts to mental health funding on the federal and local level, county jails and state prisons are where the majority of our mental health care is being administered today. According to the Treatment Advocacy Center, the largest mental health institutions in 44 of our 50 states are jails or prisons. And 10 times as many mentally ill individuals reside in jails and prisons than in state mental health hospitals, where they should.

The conclusion is heartbreaking but no longer undeniable: we have criminalized mental illness in America, and you are paying for it.

Thomas J Dart writing: American jails have become the new mental asylums – and you’re paying the bill, in The Guardian.

Practice Makes Perfect…

Today’s headlines include:

Local News

Safe swimming
Cases against brothers on hold
Speller doesn’t advance
Snyder due back home today
Cleanup ongoing at site of gas leak

Top Headlines Poll: How much of a danger do you think video games pose?

(For comparison’s sake, I’ve added a link to the The Anchor News to these posts.)

What’s going on here…

Previously…

The Series: America’s mental health: a crisis in care…

At any given time, there may be a few hundred homeless people in Seattle’s Pioneer Square neighborhood, huddling under the overpasses from the persistent Washington rain. It’s a familiar place for Geraldine, who has spent the past 20 years caring for her 38-year-old son, who is mentally ill.

When her son is not in prison or in hospital, Geraldine, 64, makes daily visits to a three-block area to bring him food, drink and warm clothing. She knows the color of his sleeping bag, and seeks it out among the dozens of others in between the shopping carts and trash bags. Sometimes he rejects her help. Other times, he gives her gifts to other people on the street.

Often, her son has lost more weight, and his hair is more unkempt. His eyes look distant and strained.

These days, however, instead of going to Pioneer Square, Geraldine makes a weekly trip to a psychiatric hospital, where her son is being treated for schizophrenia.

Amanda Holpuch writing in: A safe place to stay: the struggle to find housing for America’s mentally ill patients, for The Guardian.

You may write me down in history
With your bitter, twisted lies,
You may trod me in the very dirt
But still, like dust, I’ll rise.

Does my sassiness upset you?
Why are you beset with gloom?
‘Cause I walk like I’ve got oil wells
Pumping in my living room.

Just like moons and like suns,
With the certainty of tides,
Just like hopes springing high,
Still I’ll rise.

Did you want to see me broken?
Bowed head and lowered eyes?
Shoulders falling down like teardrops,
Weakened by my soulful cries?

Does my haughtiness offend you?
Don’t you take it awful hard
‘Cause I laugh like I’ve got gold mines
Diggin’ in my own backyard.

You may shoot me with your words,
You may cut me with your eyes,
You may kill me with your hatefulness,
But still, like air, I’ll rise.

Does my sexiness upset you?
Does it come as a surprise
That I dance like I’ve got diamonds
At the meeting of my thighs?

Out of the huts of history’s shame
I rise
Up from a past that’s rooted in pain
I rise
I’m a black ocean, leaping and wide,
Welling and swelling I bear in the tide.

Leaving behind nights of terror and fear
I rise
Into a daybreak that’s wondrously clear
I rise
Bringing the gifts that my ancestors gave,
I am the dream and the hope of the slave.
I rise
I rise
I rise.

–Maya Angelou, Still I Rise

In the nearly year and a half since I have been investigating America’s broken mental health system – even with my 30-year background in clinical psychology – I have been shocked to learn just how much our country has failed those with severe mental illness.

Take Elliot Rodger, a 22-year-old whose instability was known, but went overlooked before he killed six college students and himself in California over the weekend. Or take Gus Deeds, another young man who was in mental health crisis but was denied extended inpatient care before he killed himself and stabbed his father, a Virginia state senator. There was Adam Lanza in Connecticut, Jared Loughner in Tucson, James Holmes in Aurora, Aaron Alexis at the Washington Navy Yard, and on and on.

All had untreated or undertreated serious mental illness. All spiraled out of control within a system that lacked the basic mechanisms to help.

While these are extreme cases, they highlight how our broken system does not respond until after a crisis when we could be doing something to stop it from happening. But even in the face of tragedy, we are too uncomfortable to acknowledge the facts because the last bastion of stigma in mental health concerns those with serious mental illness.

The facts are that mental illness is a brain disease, and of the 9.6m people in this country with a serious mental illness – like schizophrenia, bipolar disorder or major clinical depression – approximately 40% won’t even receive treatment this year.

We’ve found it easier to focus both the discussion and public resources on gauzy programs for “behavioral wellness” and “emotional well-being” than to confront the painful reality that those with schizophrenia or severe psychosis are more likely to up without care (4.4m), homeless (250,000), in prison or on parole (1.3m), or dead by or attempting suicide (1.38m) than in appropriate psychiatric treatment (approximately 4m).

Rep. Tim Murphy (R-Pa.) writing in Dear Washington: take serious mental illness seriously. It’s a matter of life and death

Today’s headlines include:

Local News

Business climate
Marilyn Ortt:
Spelling champ vs. nation’s best
Strawberries: Go get ’em
More facts sought on armory makeover

Top Headlines Poll: How much of a danger do you think video games pose?

(For comparison’s sake, I’ve added a link to the The Anchor News to these posts.)

What’s going on here…

Previously…

In the last several years, national tragedies like the shootings in Newtown have put pressure on the US government to improve access to mental health treatment. This weekend’s violence in Santa Barbara has reignited the issue. But behind these headline-grabbing mass killings is a much broader crisis.

The most publicised reform came in November 2013 when the Obama administration issued regulations directing all private American insurance plans to cover mental health care in the same way as other medical care. These regulations mean, among other things, that co-payments and caps for mental health-related treatment cannot be more expensive or restrictive than for any other type of medical care.

There’s just one problem: while Obama may have expanded access to mental health benefits, the reach of the services those benefits theoretically provide hasn’t kept up. The availability of mental health care in the US remains woefully inadequate to handle current demand, never mind a potential influx of new patients.

Paul Appelbaum, a Columbia University psychiatrist and an expert on legal and ethical issues in medicine and psychiatry, uses a simple phrase to sum up the biggest problem.

“Right to care does not mean access to treatment,” he says. “Tens of millions of people who did not have insurance coverage may now be prompted to seek mental health treatment. And the capacity just isn’t there to treat them.”

Ruth Spencer writing for the first installment of The Guardian’s America’s mental health care crisis.

Via Pharyngula…

The City is now in just 10 weeklies. Most of its readership comes from the GoComics site. It is no longer fun to crank out the strip every week. In fact, it’s an ordeal. Frankly, I’ve run out of things to say. I’m also having great difficulty writing in the strip format. The open-ended freedom of graphic novels ruined me as a comic strip writer, just as the strip ruined me as a single-panel cartoonist all those years ago. I’m simply not smart enough to bounce back and forth between formats, I guess.

I held out until May, for the sake of serendipity. The City debuted in May, and that’s when it ends. I do a third tour in France. I worked ahead, knowing that I’d pull the plug when I returned to the States.

The farewell strip is not a new strip. In fact, it’s over four years old.

Here’s the story. In 2009, I had that second go round with cancer. Well, not cancer specifically, but rather radiation damage from cancer treatment in 2003. They zapped me in the chest to kill a large tumor and the major arteries were so scarred up from the procedure that, six years later, I was in big trouble. I was rushed into surgery to re-plumb or replace everything. The surgeons were upbeat, as they always are, but I knew the score. So I drew this farewell strip and gave it to a buddy with instructions to post it if I didn’t make it

The idea came to me right away. No one under 40 probably gets the Carol Burnett connection, but who cares? Great goodbye tunes are surprisingly rare, and I didn’t want to be weepy or anything. Go out with a smirk, that was the goal. But I survived, and the farewell strip got tossed on my pile of originals in my studio closet.

It wasn’t my plan to use it as my farewell strip this time, but when I sat down to write, I couldn’t think of anything but this one. It was stuck in my head. I was really running on fumes. It was also surprisingly emotional closing the strip down, and, to top it off, I was jet-lagged from my third trip to France. I knew I wasn’t going to come up with a better strip, so why fight it? Besides, it’s good karma to publish it on a happy occasion, not the tragic one it was originally made for. The only change is the third panel. I swapped out the original for one last shot at a Tea Party dickhead. Couldn’t resist.

Even though I was at peace with the decision, it was tough hitting that “send” button. I planned to email it out to my papers on Sunday, so they’d have it first thing Monday morning, several days early, so they could have ample time to find a replacement strip. I just couldn’t do it. Finally, Monday evening, I gritted my teeth and did the deed. I felt good afterwards.

I’m so happy I get to end it this way, not as a washed-up has-been slinking off in defeat, but on my terms.

It was a great ride.

And that’s the end.

John “Derf” Backderf writing at Derfcity…

Today’s headlines include:

Local News

Communities celebrate Memorial Day
B-W honors the many who served
Williamstown woman helps in many ways
New recruit at Marietta PD
Williamstown Memorial Day parade draws hundreds

Top Headlines Poll: Do you have a friend or relative who was hurt or killed while serving in the U.S. military?

(For comparison’s sake, I’ve added a link to the The Anchor News to these posts.)

What’s going on here…

Previously…

Jobs are available in and around Marietta, Ohio—well-paying blue-collar jobs—thanks to the oil and gas drilling in the Utica and Marcellus shale formations that run deep beneath the bucolic hills of Washington County. The local economy is not as robust as during its manufacturing heyday, when chemical, metals, and plastics plants dominated the Ohio River waterfront. But a welder can make $35 an hour at one of the flood-lit drilling sites outside town; a roustabout can make $18. The parking lot at the Fairfield Inn off Route 7 is filled with out-of-state trucks from Boots & Coots, a Halliburton subsidiary specializing in well-pressure control. Yet in this Rust Belt city of 14,000, many jobs either go untaken or are filled by out-of-staters. Intergenerational poverty is common, a paradox explained in part by a host of social problems—family breakdown, dependency, drug abuse, and educational indifference. These pathologies run as deep here as the confluence of the Muskingum and Ohio Rivers on Front Street—notwithstanding the fact that the city is 97 percent white. In fact, locals speak (sometimes softly, as if it were politically incorrect) of a pervasive culture of “Appalachian values,” reminiscent of the values and behaviors often thought to be confined to America’s black urban underclass.

Reader Fred O’Neill has alerted me to this piece on my hometown in City Journal.

On Sunday, Santa Barbara’s county sheriff, Bill Brown, blamed failures in mental-health treatment for the fact that [Elliot] Rodger’s behaviour had worried people around him and precipitated three contacts with police, most recently last month, but had not caused an intervention that might have averted the slaughter.

“I think the fact of the matter is, there’s a general lack of resources in community mental-health treatment generally,” he told CNN on Sunday. “There’s also probably a lack of notification by healthcare professionals in instances when people are expressing suicidal or in certain cases homicidal thoughts or tendencies.”

An attorney for Rodger’s father said Rodger was diagnosed as a high-functioning patient with Asperger’s syndrome and had trouble making friends. “The Rodger family offers our deepest compassion and sympathies to the families involved in this terrible tragedy. We are experiencing the most inconceivable pain and our hearts go out to everyone involved,” the family said in a statement on Saturday.

Rory Carroll and Martin Pengelly writing for The Guardian. The comments are, of course, coming fast and furious.

Previously…

Today’s headlines include:

Local News

The Shell disaster: 20 years ago
1994 tragedy bonds plant, Belpre
Veterans memorial coming in Reno
‘Great things ahead,’ MHS Class of 2014 is told
Waterford grads remember the good times

Top Headlines Poll: Do you have a friend or relative who was hurt or killed while serving in the U.S. military?

(For comparison’s sake, I’ve added a link to the The Anchor News to these posts.)

What’s going on here…

Previously…

In the final chapter of 40 pages he lets fly at the media elites and their craven subservience to the political-financial ruling class. The reaction to the Snowden revelations exposed this rift very clearly with those who were the lackeys of that class condemning both Snowden and Greenwald in personal terms. With Snowden, they sneered that such a young man, a high school dropout from a lower middle class background, would have the nerve to think that he had the right to tell everyone what the government was doing in secret instead of trusting his ‘betters’. And to compound his crime, he ignored the ‘respectable’ press and its courtier journalists but chose as his conduit someone they did not even consider to be worthy of being called a journalist.

Fortunately for us and unfortunately for them, Snowden and Greenwald and Poitras were the ideal team because they were not interested in currying favor with the elites. And in this they were greatly aided by the Guardian editors and reporters who, despite occasional wobbles and missteps, came through at crucial times. The editors’ unilateral decision to give some of the Snowden documents to the New York Times, which was desperate to be part of the story, was one rift and angered the trio and Snowden especially since he despised the Times for its past history of colluding with the government and he especially wanted to exclude them from receiving anything.

This book is essential reading for anyone who wants to know about the whirlwind unleashed by Edward Snowden. I can strongly recommend it.

–From Mano Singham’s review of Glenn Greenwald’s No Place To Hide: Edward Snowden, The NSA, and the U.S. Surveillance State by way of My Electronic Chapbook…

Previously…

I choose not to repeat or link to any mention of Elliot Rodgers. Those interested in such information have a plethora of sources readily available.

There is one, only one, truth I wish to articulate regarding Elliot Rodgers: until we get some kind of grip on mental health and our mental health system, we will continue to lament violence in our world and the dangers to the people we care for and love.