I was in Dallas giving a speech when news broke that Aaron Alexis had heard voices and appeared to have a mental illness. I was asked about the Navy Yard shooter during interviews with the local NPR affiliate at KERA radio and with the Dallas Morning News. While I always point out that persons with mental illnesses are more likely to be victims of violence rather than committing it, I took a different approach in both interviews.
I said we need to acknowledge that some individuals are dangerous but what keeps most of them from acting out is that they get meaningful treatment. I hoped to tie the need for treatment to these horrific and reoccurring tragedies.
Fortunately, NPR’s Krys Boyd and the Dallas News’ Christina Rosales didn’t sensationalize my remarks as they easily could have.
Treatment Is Our Best Hope For Stopping Senseless Violence
Honoring Her Sister Through LIME-light: Mental Health Awareness
A GUEST BLOG: A Hopeful Color For Mental Health Awareness
I lost my younger sister to suicide in 2004. It was a shock. She was 36.
I wanted to do something.
Stacey
Stacey’s illness presented postpartum and unexpectedly. Her diagnosis: Bipolar Disorder I.
When my sister was a child, she was not diagnosed with a mental illness. I remember her having some schoolwork difficulties and some going back and forth between parents who were divorced, but she had no diagnosis. During her teenage and high school years, my sister was known for her outward beauty and socializing popularity. Grades continued to be difficult through college, and sometimes she slept late. However, it wasn’t until after she married and was postpartum with her second child that symptoms uncovered a brain-related condition. Paranoia and frenzied activity began with a business idea. She experienced her first hospitalization.
I Will “Never Let My Illness Control Me!” A Woman Speaks Out About Herself and Her Father
FROM MY FILES FRIDAY: A year ago, I published this letter from a young woman dealing with her’s father’s mental illness and her own. I hope you find it as compelling as I did and still do.
Hi Pete Earley,
…I came across your book while looking for a source of comfort during my own family’s time of need. Two months ago, my dad was finally forced into treatment for his undiagnosed severe bipolar disorder and coexisting extreme alcoholism. My mother and I (I am an only child) have been trying unsuccessfully for years to get him help.
In order for him to finally be involuntary subjected to treatment, he had to have a major traumatic psychotic episode and had to contact Help 4 Addiction for his alcohol rehabilitation. He had a previous psychotic episode earlier this year that landed him in a mental health facility for one week. But the latest one proved even more traumatic to all of us.
Anti-Psychotics: Dr. Insel Stirs The Pot By Questioning Long Term Use Of Drugs
Dr. Tom Insel is stirring the pot again!
You might recall that the director of the National Institute of Mental Health upset many in psychiatry when he dismissed the DSM-5, the so-called Psychiatry Bible, in an April 29th blog just weeks before the new edition was scheduled to be published. (In addition to his original blog, you might wish to read the New Yorker’s take on Insel’s words.)
Now Dr. Insel has published a blog that questions the long term value of anti-psychotics. For those of us whose family members have been helped by medication, his comments are troubling. Each time my son has stopped taking his medication, his symptoms have returned and he’s gotten into trouble. I’ve always known there may be adverse side effects. We have discussed them. The question that Dr. Insel didn’t answer is how are we to know beforehand when and if someone can reduce or stop taking their medication?
My friend, Dr. Dinah Miller, one of the author’s of the popular blog, Shrink Rap, raised this question when she reacted to Dr. Insel’s blog.
So perhaps you’ve heard that people with certain mental disorders need to stay on their medications forever. Certainly, some do — they stop their medicines and each time they try that experiment they end up sick — in the hospital, in jail, on the street, or simply festering in the basement. But some people stop their medicines and they don’t get sick, so clearly, not everyone with a given diagnosis must stay on medicines for life, but we don’t have a way of knowing who needs them and who doesn’t. We know risks for populations (maybe, to read Dr. Insel’s blog, we don’t know them as well as we thought), yet we know nothing about a given individual until a doc stops the meds or the patient goes off them on their own. We also know that the medicines have risks. How much risk? Who knows. Here, one figure sticks: of those who remain on an older generation antipsychotic (Haldol, thorazine, prolixin) for 25 years, 68% will get tardive dyskinesia. And that figure doesn’t say anything about dose.
Because medication is such a controversial issue, I’m not going to interpret what Dr. Insel wrote. Instead, you should read it for yourself.
Anti-psychotics: Taking the Long View
By Thomas Insel on
One of the first lessons I received as a psychiatrist-in-training 35 years ago was the value of antipsychotic medications. These medicines have been available for the treatment of psychosis for over half a century, beginning with the prototype first generation drug chlorpromazine (Thorazine) and now extending to some 20 different compounds, including several second-generation medications, often called “atypical antipsychotics.” Symptoms such as hallucinations, delusions, and paranoia are reduced reliably by these drugs. Although these symptoms can be frightening and dangerous for patients, family members, and providers, antipsychotics safely and effectively help people through the crisis of acute psychosis.
My Birthday Reminds Me To Smell The Roses
I turned sixty-two last Thursday and my wife, Patti, hosted a family party on Sunday. When you have a blended family of seven, there’s always someone having a birthday but this one was different for me. I can’t say that I am going through a mid-life crisis because I already have done that, several times. I am now old enough to collect Social Security so I have to acknowledge that I have walked over the middle age line .
The first week of September is always a time of taking stock for me. Patti’s first husband, Steve, died on September 2nd when he and Patti were in their thirties. Her sister, Joanne, died recently from cancer and would have celebrated her 50th birthday on Sept. 4th. Whenever I complain about getting older, Patti reminds me that Steve and Joanne didn’t celebrate as many birthdays as I have. Patti has no patience for self-pity.
Promises to Traitors Matter: Ames and Blood Money
FROM MY FILES FRIDAY: When Edward Snowden sought asylum in Russia after leaking National Security Agency documents to the media, I began getting telephone calls. Reporters wanted to know if I thought the Kremlin would welcome Snowden or turn him over to American authorities. I predicted Moscow would protect him. If Russia would have refused him asylum, spies currently working for Russia would have become alarmed — even though Snowden never worked for Russian intelligence. The following blog describes how important image and reputations are in the spy game, so much so, that the Russians tried to interest me in helping deliver $2 million to CIA traitor Aldrich Ames several months after he was arrested.
A Spy Story: Ames, Blood Money and Me, published Nov. 15, 2010
If you’ve read my book, Confessions of a Spy: The Real Story of Aldrich Ames, you already know that I was able to interview the CIA traitor, Aldrich Ames, for eleven days without government censors listening to our conversations. This is because federal prosecutors had notified everyone – Ames’ defense attorneys, the FBI, the CIA, and Justice Department – that Ames was not to be interviewed by the media, except for the officials who mattered the most — the deputies in charge of the Alexandria jail.
