mental health

Kaiser Strikers Say When Therapists Burn Out, Patients Suffer

December 16, 2024 Adriana Webb, Labor Notes. Resist! Health Care, Kaiser Permanente, mental health, Walkouts, Worker Rights and Jobs

I work as a medical social worker in the infectious diseases clinic, working primarily with patients who have been diagnosed with HIV and AIDS. I help my patients navigate Kaiser’s complex health care system, get access to needed resources, and figure out how they can afford a life-sustaining medication that often costs thousands of dollars per month. I see firsthand how Kaiser’s mental health system is failing these patients. It’s nearly impossible for them to get access to timely mental health care, and because Kaiser treats its therapists like assembly-line factory workers, so many therapists get burned out and leave.

No Child Should Be A Target

November 21, 2024 Palestine Global Mental Health Network, Mondoweiss. Organize! Children, Genocide, International Solidarity, Lebanon, mental health, Palestine, War crimes

The Palestine-Global Mental Health Network, along with its international counterparts, is now launching an international campaign to demand that world governments hold Israel accountable to the principles of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child—principles which prioritize the inherent right to life and uphold the best interests of all children. The genocidal intentions of the Zionist settler-colonial state, recognized by many as Israel, (hereinafter referred to as Israel), are made clear in various documented statements by its officials. The former Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant has derogatorily referred to Palestinians as “human animals”, while Israeli President Isaac Herzog has stated, “there are no innocent civilians in Gaza”.

UnitedHealth’s Playbook For Limiting Coverage Puts Countless People At Risk

November 20, 2024 Annie Waldman, ProPublica. Educate! Denials, health, Health Insurance, Insurance, mental health, UnitedHealthcare

For years, it was a mystery: Seemingly out of the blue, therapists would feel like they’d tripped some invisible wire and become a target of UnitedHealth Group. A company representative with the Orwellian title “care advocate” would call and grill them about why they’d seen a patient twice a week or weekly for six months. In case after case, United would refuse to cover care, leaving patients to pay out-of-pocket or go without it. The severity of their issues seemed not to matter. Around 2016, government officials began to pry open United’s black box.

When You Suffer For Your Sanity And Struggle To Get Free

September 27, 2024 Vijay Prashad, Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research. Educate! Community, COVID-19, mental health

In 1930, Clément Fraisse (1901–1980), a shepherd from France’s Lozère region, was confined in a nearby psychiatric hospital after he tried to burn down his parents’ farmhouse. For two years, he was held in a dark, narrow cell. Using a spoon, and later the handle of his chamber pot, Fraisse carved symmetrical images into the rough, wooden walls that surrounded him. Despite the inhumane conditions in these psychiatric hospitals, Fraisse made beautiful art in the darkness of his cell. Not far from Lozère is the monastery of Saint Paul de Mausole in Saint-Rémy-de-Provence, where Vincent van Gogh had been confined four decades earlier (1889–1890) and where he completed around 150 paintings, including several important works (among them The Starry Night, 1889).

Fighting Privatization Is Good For Mental Health

September 19, 2024 Elena Gormley, In These Times. Organize! Chicago, Health Care, mental health, Privatization

This spring, Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson announced a dramatic change in the city’s mental health policy, promising to reopen public clinics shuttered for more than a decade. Today, my administration is taking extraordinary steps to reverse the course and expand our city’s systems of mental health,” Johnson said May 30, outside the Roseland Mental Health Center. “We are standing here on the Far South Side to make it clear that we are prioritizing those who have been left behind and discarded by previous administrations.” In addition to Roseland, the city plans to reopen two more public clinics, in the Pilsen and West Garfield Park neighborhoods.

Here’s How Non-Police Crisis Response Programs Have Been Working

February 5, 2024 Meg O’Connor, Scheer Post. Create! Crisis Response, Emergency services, mental health, Police

Over the past three years, tens of thousands of people in crisis have been met with behavioral health specialists and social workers instead of police officers. Interactions like these are taking place across the country more often today compared to previous years. While unarmed crisis responders have existed for decades, public outrage over the 2020 police killings of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Daniel Prude, and many others prompted cities to create new ways to respond to people in crisis. Police are often called to respond to situations involving people experiencing mental health crises—with disastrous results.

The Final Nail In Psychiatry’s Antidepressant Coffin

January 18, 2024 Bruce E. Levine, Counter Punch. Educate! Antidepressants, Big Pharma, Health Care, Medications, mental health, Psychiatry

Historically, there have always been some patients who report that any treatment for depression—including bloodletting—has worked for them, but science demands that for a treatment to be deemed truly effective, it must work better than a placebo or the passage of time without any treatment. This is especially important for antidepressant drugs—including Prozac, Zoloft, and other selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs), as well as Effexor, Cymbalta, and other serotonin and norepinephrine reuptake inhibitors (SNRIs)—because all of these drugs have uncontroversial troubling side effects.

Hidden Toll Of Hurricane Katrina On The Mental Health Of Black Survivors

November 30, 2023 Maya Richard-Craven, Scalawag. Educate! Black America, Extreme weather, Health Care, Hurricane Katrina, mental health

When Hurricane Katrina touched down in New Orleans in late August 2005, nine-year-old Nia Burnett was too young to realize that her life would never be the same. Nia's family had chosen to stay in the city and wait out the storm. They all headed to a local hospital for safety. What they found were corpses lining the hallways. The whole building smelled like rotten flesh. Nia remembers later standing on the roof after the hospital started flooding, waiting to be rescued. Below her, she watched as all the neighborhoods she used to play in with her friends were swallowed up by the rising waters. Meanwhile, even more bodies floated around the hospital. It wasn't until 11 years after the storm that Nia was diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder.

Kaiser’s Massive Mental Health Care Settlement Sends Strong Message

October 15, 2023 Mark Kreidler, Scheer Post. Resist! California, Health Care, Kaiser Permanente, mental health, Worker Rights and Jobs

Kaiser Permanente’s $200 million settlement with the State of California for its repeated failures to provide patients with adequate and timely mental health care was a long while coming. The deficiencies themselves? Kaiser’s own employees say they’ve been hiding in plain sight. “Years and years of banging our heads against the wall have finally paid off,” said Ilana Marcucci-Morris, a therapist at Kaiser Permanente’s Oakland Medical Center. “This has the potential to make Kaiser a leader in mental health care, rather than a serial violator of mental health care laws.” The settlement, announced late Thursday by the state’s Department of Managed Health Care, includes a $50 million fine.

Disability Justice And Neurodivergent Community Rally To ‘Stop The Shock’

September 22, 2023 Brian Shea and Edward Yudelovich, Workers' World. Resist! Boston, Disability Rights, Massachusetts, mental health

Stop the Shock – a coalition of more than 30 organizations in the Disability Justice and Neurodivergent community – organized a rally and press briefing at the Boston Common on Sept 9. The rally succeeded in garnering greater publicity and support for passing House H180 in the Massachusetts state legislature to outlaw the use of aversion therapy. Aversion therapy includes skin shocks, pinching, ammonia face spraying, contingent food programs (using food deprivation as punishment), long-term restraints, sensory deprivation and white noise helmets used primarily against children with disabilities. All of these methods are used at the Judge Rotenberg Center (JRC) in Canton, Massachusetts.

Our Collective Trauma Is The Road To Tyranny

September 4, 2023 Chris Hedges, Scheer Post. Strategize! Capitalism, Chris Hedges, mental health, Trauma, Tyranny

Corporate capitalism, defined by the cult of the self and the ruthless exploitation of the natural world and all forms of life for profit, thrives on the fostering of chronic psychological and physical disorders. The diseases and pathologies of despair — alienation, high blood pressure, diabetes, anxiety, depression, morbid obesity, mass shootings (now almost two per day on average), domestic and sexual violence, drug overdoses (over 100,000 per year) and suicide (49,000 deaths in 2022) — are the consequences of a deeply traumatized society. The core traits of psychopaths — superficial charm, grandiosity and self-importance, a need for constant stimulation, a penchant for lying, deception, manipulation and the inability to feel remorse or guilt — are celebrated.

Policing The Police In The East Bay Area

August 25, 2023 Ann Garrison, Black Agenda Report. Resist! California, mental health, Police, Police accountability

If you think the San Francisco Bay Area is “woke,” you probably don’t know about East Contra Costa County, in the East Bay, where nearly half the City of Antioch’s police department are now on leave for police misconduct that includes exchanging racist, homophobic, and misogynist text messages, some of which include the n-word and references to Black people as gorillas and monkeys. In one instance it was revealed that one cop had sent another a text image depicting the Black police chief, who had been on the job for about a year, as a gorilla . The chief resigned shortly thereafter without saying why.

Chris Hedges Report: America’s Trauma Epidemic And Its Broken Politics

July 30, 2023 Chris Hedges, The Real News Network. Resistance Report Chris Hedges, Failed State, mental health, Trauma, Violence

Violence is ubiquitous in American life, and so is the trauma that follows in its wake. From the domestic sphere to the public sphere, interpersonal violence, particularly of a sexual nature, is all-too-common in the US. How does the resulting trauma manifest, and how does this trauma shape everything from our personal relationships to our politics? Specialist Dr. Judith Lewis Herman joins The Chris Hedges Report for an in-depth discussion on how trauma distorts the mind and the body politic alike. Dr. Judith Lewis Herman is a psychiatrist who studies trauma and developed the diagnosis for Complex PTSD. She is the author of several books, including her most recent, Truth and Repair: How Trauma Survivors Envision Justice.

The Insanity Of Solitary Confinement

June 10, 2023 John Kiriakou, Consortium News. Educate! mental health, Prisons, Solitary Confinement, Torture

Solitary confinement is the practice of isolating a prisoner from all human contact for an extended period of time. It is often used as a form of punishment or to control behavior, but it can have serious negative effects on mental health. Most countries around the world limit the time that a prisoner can spend in solitary to 15 days. The United States doesn’t. There are scores of prisoners across the U.S. who have been in solitary for years and, in some cases, decades. It should be clear to everybody — the courts, the states, and the Federal Bureau of Prisons — that solitary only worsens already bad situations. It shouldn’t be in use.

Psychiatric Incarceration Isn’t Treatment

May 7, 2023 Leah Harris, Liat Ben-Moshe, and Vesper Moore, Truthout. Resist! Abolition, incarceration, mental health, White Supremacy

The horrific choking murder of 30-year-old Jordan Neely by a white MTA rider on May 1, 2023, in the New York City subway sparked mass outrage, with demonstrators converging on subway stations while cops brought “force and chaos” to a vigil in his memory. The murder has put a renewed spotlight on carceral logics of the state that assume the disposability of Black, poor and unhoused people — in particular those said to be in “mental health crisis.” New York Gov. Kathy Hochul’s response to Neely’s killing deflects from the white supremacist violence and ongoing lack of accountability for the killer, and instead medicalizes Neely’s death: “People who are homeless in our subways, many of them in the throes of mental health episodes, and that’s what I believe were some of the factors involved here.

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