WSKG (https://wskg.org/tag/mental-health/)
Listen Live - WSKG Listen Live - WSQXROCHESTER, NY (WXXI) – Reports of sexual abuse of individuals with disabilities in New York State funded and licensed facilities will now be investigated by a newly created response team.
An NPR investigation found people with intellectual disabilities have one of the nation’s highest rates of sexual assault. Now states, communities and advocates are proposing changes to prevent abuse.
SYRACUSE, NY (WRVO) – For teens facing depression, stress and other mental health problems, suicide can seem like way out.
With millions of lives in immigration limbo, the long-term effects of uncertainty are beginning to worry mental health experts.
KEYSTONE CROSSWORDS – Following a U.S. Department of Justice investigation in 2014, the Disability Rights Network of Pennsylvania filed a lawsuit against the Pennsylvania Department of Corrections, demanding changes to provide better care for mentally ill inmates. DOC settled in 2015, and three years later, the state says it no longer uses solitary confinement as prevalently. “We no longer utilize the same level of segregation that we did prior to the reports and the investigations,” said Lynn Patrone, DOC’s mental health advocate. She said the department is working to meet the requirement that the settlement put forward to divert inmates into treatment instead of solitary confinement. Patrone said even when the misconduct of inmates with mental illness results in solitary confinement, they are offered 20 hours of out-of-cell activities per week.
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HARRISBURG (WSKG) — A Pennsylvania psychiatrist and his colleagues are noticing some troubling mental health trends related to joblessness among their working-class patients. And those trends seem inextricably tied with the current political climate. Dr. Kenneth Thompson is the president of the American Association for Social Psychiatry. He’s based in Pittsburgh, and said many of the people he sees fall into a specific category–they’re white, male, high school-educated former Democratic voters who supported Donald Trump for president. And he said increasing numbers of those people are struggling with addiction or mental health issues that seem tied to the trouble they’re having in the current economy. “The overall sense is there’s a population that is more highly stressed than it has been in the past,” he said.
On December 14, 2012, a disturbed young man committed a horrific mass shooting in Newtown, Connecticut that took the lives of 20 elementary school children and six educators. Filmed over the course of nearly three years, Newtown uses deeply personal, never-before-heard testimonies to tell the story of the aftermath of the deadliest mass shooting of schoolchildren in American history. Through raw and heartbreaking interviews with parents, siblings, teachers, doctors, and first responders, Newtown documents a traumatized community still reeling from the senseless killing, fractured by grief but driven toward a sense of purpose. There are no words of compassion or reassurance that can bring back those who lost their lives during the shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School. Instead, Snyder delves into the lives and homes of those who remain, all of whom have been indelibly changed by the events.
Editor’s Note: WSKG invited community partner and local service organization Mothers and Babies Perinatal Network to share insight on initiatives that are helping families going through incarceration. Through the Eyes of Children
Let’s imagine, for a moment, that you are 8 years old again. You are spending a regular Tuesday night with your mother and two younger siblings. The normal evening routine was underway…dinner was over, you are bathed, in your pajamas, and playing with your favorite toy while your mother puts your little brother and sister to bed. Next, you and your mother meet in your bedroom to read your favorite bedtime story.
Editor’s Note: WSKG has asked faculty and graduate students in the History Department at Binghamton University to explore the history behind PBS’s new drama Mercy Street. In today’s blog post, Professor Diane Sommerville discusses the topic of suicide and the Civil War.
Warning: this post contains spoilers. The Battlefield is Hard on a Boy: Suicide in the Civil War
In Episode 4 of Mercy Street, the daring escape of Confederate private Tom Fairfax ends with his suicide. Tom’s boyhood friend Frank Stringfellow spirits him out of Mansion House Hospital under cover of darkness and escorts him to nearby Confederate lines so that Tom can rejoin his regiment. As Frank prepares his departure, Tom begins muttering, looking pre-occupied and anxious.
Writing of the mental illness called schizophrenia can allow a novelist to open many themes and characterizations. For one thing, the cause for disorder itself is a mystery, so there is an evasive culprit who could attack at any time. The victims are frequently young, their promising lives distorted and confused. The world becomes bizarre and unmanageable; those who could help are often fearful and frustrated. Uncertainty spreads, complications abound and neat conclusions are rarely apparent. The hallucinations that are common in schizophrenia also can make for powerful descriptive prose, as the author draws the reader into the mind of someone losing a grip on reality. What Kevin noticed was the red flannel shirt on a man sitting at the end of the bar. Other reds in the room began to glimmer — the cigarette packs on the tables, the labels on bottles behind the bar, the red lines in the eyes of the man standing next to him. It was as if all red had a light behind it, causing the color to glow. Then the colors exploded in the way a white light does in a photo flash, turning the back of his eyelids red when he closed them. — from “When Truth Lies”
If the unreality experienced by Kevin rings true it could be because author Terry Garahan — now an instructor of mental health counseling at Ithaca College — spent many years thinking about and working on “When Truth Lies”, years also spent running outpatient mental health services in Ithaca, NY. He is a licensed clinical social worker and developed in Tompkins County “a proactive approach to working with emotionally disturbed persons and those with mental illness”, which received national attention. Garahan is also an FBI-trained hostage negotiator. “When Truth Lies” is subtitled “A Journey with Schizophrenia” and opens in 1967, at the emergence of a counter-culture that could feed anyone’s disorientation. We follow Kevin from his home in the community of Laketon, NY — a fictional college town clearly inspired by Ithaca — through mental health institutions and wandering around the country in a Dantesque descent through settings of Hell, Purgatory and at least an implication of Paradise. Terry Garahan joins Bill Jaker on OFF THE PAGE to discuss the life challenges of persons dealing with mental illness.