http://www.dbsanwct.com/dennis an insider’s view of mood disorders Sun, 06 Jul 2008 01:58:41 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en At first blush the case of Esmin Green, a Jamaican immigrant who died unattended on the floor of a Brooklyn psychiatric emergency room, is outrageous. She’d been left in a chair in a waiting-room for 24 hours before falling off that chair and dying. It hardly seems possible that a ... http://www.dbsanwct.com/dennis/2008/07/05/its-nothing-new/ The headline of this ABC News report says it all: “Ignored Psych Patient Dies on Hospital Floor.” Most people go to the hospital to get help, not to be allowed to fall on the floor and left to die ... despite having security guards — and even a doctor! — ... http://www.dbsanwct.com/dennis/2008/07/01/hospital-lets-psych-patient-die/ Over the last two weeks there have been a number of shooting-sprees across the US. The most recent was at Northern Illinois University. It turns out the shooter had been in treatment for a mental disorder:University Police Chief Donald Grady said Friday that Kazmierczak had become erratic in the past ... http://www.dbsanwct.com/dennis/2008/02/16/senseless-and-needless/ It’s a scandal! Of course antidepressants don’t work, and their makers know it! Now we have proof!... uh, guess again, folks ... the real story here isn’t entirely what you may think it is. Here’s a sample story on this revelation (this one from the New York Times):The makers of ... http://www.dbsanwct.com/dennis/2008/01/17/antidepressant-study-scandal/ As I do most days I just did a Google News search on “bipolar disorder.” I noticed that most of the top-listed stories were about Britney Spears and her latest pathetic publicity stunt; I didn’t actually read the stories but from the headlines I surmise that rumor has it she’s ... http://www.dbsanwct.com/dennis/2008/01/16/mental-illness-and-the-mass-media/ I hadn’t spent more than a couple months in the world of psychiatry, before I realized that having more than one diagnosis was common. But a recent news item actually backs up this intuition with hard data:A new study discovers a majority of psychiatry outpatients have more than one disorder, ... http://www.dbsanwct.com/dennis/2008/01/16/prolific-diagnoses/ I came across a review at Slate, the online magazine, of a book on ECT, commonly referred to as “shock therapy.” It offered a view of ECT that one rarely sees anywhere else in the media; namely that it’s a powerful treatment for mood disorders, and that the visions of ... http://www.dbsanwct.com/dennis/2008/01/06/a-shocking-view/ By now you’ve heard about the Omaha mall shooting; the perpetrator was said to have been depressed. The result of this is that people will associate atrocities like this, with depression ... but without reason. The fact is that people with depression are no more or less violent than anyone ... http://www.dbsanwct.com/dennis/2007/12/10/in-the-news-recently/ With the holidays upon us, the mass media give us obligatory stories about depression and the holidays. This is both good and bad ... it brings to people’s minds an important topic, but as with so much the mass media do, it can also propagate misinformation. This year, it seems ... http://www.dbsanwct.com/dennis/2007/11/24/holidays-and-depression/ Canada recently began a deep analysis of its mental healthcare system (something the US desperately needs to do, too, but won’t, because the mentally-ill are not a political constituency that anyone in American politics cares about). Some findings are now coming out, as a result, and they are interesting. The most ... http://www.dbsanwct.com/dennis/2007/11/20/depression-in-the-workplace-canada/