Let’s Go Crazy - The Decline in US Mental Health Under Bush...

[bridgit]

'Factors linked with mental illness (including poverty, homelessness, violence and social uncertainty) have run rampant during the Bush years while psychiatric treatment options have disappeared.

Nowhere has this trend been more prevalent -- and more heartbreaking - than with Katrina survivors and veterans of Bush’s wars.

Suicide levels in the Big Easy soared 300% in the four months following Katrina, and hurricane-related mental disorders remain widespread today. Yet with hospitals still shuttered and psychiatric clinics closed, those suffering from chronic mental illnesses or post-Katrina depression and post-traumatic stress disorder have few options. A Centers for Disease Control and Prevention survey found that while 26% of respondents reported at least one family member needing mental health support following Katrina, less than 2% was receiving any.

New Orleans’ mental health crisis exacerbates its already debilitating crime rate, with police reporting a 15% higher incidence of psychiatric-related emergency calls than before Katrina. But instead of receiving treatment, many of the mentally ill end up in local prisons -- a trend repeated across the country.

In Florida, for example, over 250 prisoners who should have been transferred to state mental hospitals languish in prisons unequipped to handle their special needs. As The St. Petersburg Times reported last month, mentally-ill inmates "play poker with ghosts, climb the bars like bats or dump their lunch trays into the toilet and eat the food like soup. They will slam their heads against the wall, slice themselves with razors or plunge head-first off their bunks onto the concrete floor." With no psychiatric beds available due to funding cutbacks, inmates charged with only misdemeanors end up deteriorating in jails one Floridian official called "a dumping ground for the mentally ill." Veterans face a similar lack of support. An estimated one out of every five service members returning from Iraq suffers from psychiatric problems and, with a backlog of 400,000 cases, the Department of Veterans Affairs has proven incapable of handling the deluge. Veterans subsequently have to wait an average of five and a half months for an initial decision on disability benefits and an appeal can take years.'

http://www.dissidentvoice.org/Feb07/Wokush11.htm

[Tandalayo_Scheisskopf]

1. Who's that super-lawyer down in Alabama?

Dickey Something? Pratt? Spratt? Sounds like it is tailor made for him and perhaps an...oh, say...Mike Papantonio to class-action the living intercourse out of.

[bridgit]

5. sounds right to me...

[whistle]

2. In otherwords more mental illness

[stellanoir]

3. "Insanity is a sane response to an insane world." -Reich

[bridgit]

4. bush should have been more carfeful what he was asking for all along...

[piedmont]

6. The mental health care system here is broken.

In my state (and I suspect in most others, too), the sliding scale for billing at the state-sponsored clinics is such that you pretty much have to be completely indigent to get affordable care. And even then, the services they offer are geared mainly toward managing substance abuse. But to get private-practice care, especially when you don't have insurance, is even more expensive, and you're very lucky if you can find a psychiatrist and therapist in your area who understand how to treat your illness.

And for some reason our society thinks the standard treatments being doled out are just peachy. Big pharma has brainwashed us all into believing mental illnesses can be cured through pill-popping. No learning of coping skills necessary! Just take your meds (that may or may not be appropriately prescribed) and you'll feel all better! Don't worry about the life-changing side-effects-- we've got a pill for them too!

[bdamomma]

7. we are sacrificing our minds to bush, he is playing psychological

warfare with us, in the meantime he is mocking us all smirking and chuckling away.

[bridgit]

8. that's the smirk, the "there's nothing you can do about it" smirk...

[Edweird]

9. Not only the increase of veterans needing help,

but that fact that the smirking wonder cut funding for the VA. what scum.