Let's Go Crazy: The Decline in US Mental Health under Bush

[mwb970]

by Heather Wokusch (OpEdNews, 2/11/07)

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. That's not supporting our troops.

More at...
http://www.opednews.com/articles/opedne_heather__070211_let_s_go_crazy_3a_the_.htm

I knew Bush was driving me crazy. Looks like I'm not alone.

[Prophet 451]

1. What were you expecting?

The C-in-C is a borderline retarded dry-drunk with history's greatest Napoleon complex and (although I'm judging purely from his press conferences) possible paranoid schizophrenia; the VP is a certifiable megalomaniac and psychopath; the just gone Defence Secretary was a sociopath and Condi seems to be suffering from avoidant personality disorder. This lot don't need to be in government, they need to be on the couch, talking to someone sympathetic with some Kleenex on hand.

[Ghost Dog]

4. Not a Napoleon complex (too recent, too subtle, too complex for the chimp,

who almost certainly hasn't even read 'War and Peace').

An 'Alexander The Great Complex', though, that I can see: cartoon-like enough for the Pet Goat reader. And, as I recall, it was claimed that he was reading at least the first voluime of a novelised history of the same at the time he was first 'selected'.

I doubt, though, that the simpleton would have got as far as noticing how A the G basically went very crazy and boojumed himself, eventually quagmired under the illusion of a too-destructive false-victory and fading away, then assasinated, it seems, by those closest to him, out there in the deep depths of the bleeding heart of the then Persia, in Babylon (as Callisthenes of Olynthus would have surely foretold)...

On the other hand, some of his 'advisers' would appear to have been studying some Republican-->Imperial Roman history, with doubtless more machiavellian aims in mind.

[Prophet 451]

6. I'm a history buff

If Chimpy has been reading A The G, he's surely missed the point. In fairness though, many people do.

He reminds me a lot of the middling Roman emperorors, devoting lots of time and money to increasingly pointless and doomed projects while the Empire goes to hell beneath them. It was said that the beating heart of Rome was the Forum. Bush seems to have missed the lesson that the successful ruler listens to what the street is saying.

[Ghost Dog]

8. Pleased to meet you, Prophet! Agree with what you say,

although, US repugs appear to be attempting the transition from Republican to Imperial systems right now - cf. the times of Cicero and the First Triumvirate.

:hi:

[Prophet 451]

9. Hopefully, we can avoid the civil war n/t

[Webster Green]

2. I was already nuts....but he has caused my blood pressure to rise!

I have it under control with medication, but still try to avoid seeing him on the TeeVee.

[Prophet 451]

7. Try bourbon

Every time I see him, I administer two shots internally and I barely see him anymore :)

[CrazyOrangeCat]

3. K&R

for the powerless.

[Marrak]

5. the numbers are staggering

"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."

and consider that:

VA Takes Nine Months to Locate Data on Disability Claims by Veterans of the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars

Report Indicates that 1 in 4 Veterans of the Global War on Terrorism Claim Disabilities

[LiberalEsto]

10. Don't forget the daily stress & anxiety

that so many Americans feel every day as they watch their jobs vanish, their freedoms diminish, and their environment degrade.

I'm feeling extremely stressed and anxious these days from pure dread over what the idiots will do next. Will they nuke Iran? Will they shred the Constitution further? Will they start rounding us up and putting us in prisons?

:scared: