You might think mental illness (MI) affects only a small few–but you’d be thinking wrong. According to Kessler et al in the “Prevalence, severity, and comorbidity of 12-month DSM-IV disorders in the National Comorbidity Survey Replication,” published in 2005, 26.2% of Americans… Continue Reading
I know, I know. I’ve really hit you over the head with some of these stats, you could recite ’em in your sleep. Right, 1 in between 4 and 5 (it’s about 26.2%) Americans suffer from a mental illness in… Continue Reading
The truth is that if you have a TV or radio, or you get a newspaper, you hardly need me to run through this again for you. But just in case you missed the headline news, or felt too blue… Continue Reading
Unlike most of the Awareness Months, Weeks, or Days I cover, Mental Health Awareness Week is a grassroots public education campaign–it wasn’t designated by the Senate, it isn’t supported by an organization that’s been around since the time of… Continue Reading
Do you remember that I told you that bipolar disorder (BD) and schizophrenia have been considered completely different illnesses for. . .well, pretty much forever? Until researchers started getting a look at people’s brains? And then it seemed possible–just possible–that… Continue Reading
I do realize that from the way I blog people can start to think that all the research scientists put out there on the Web is for bloggers like me to synthesize on bipolar disease. I mean, if you read… Continue Reading
I’m a recipient of a Google Alert on Bipolar Disorder. This just means that Google automatically notifies me when there’s new news (as opposed to the old kind, I guess) on the web on BD. It can be from news… Continue Reading
It has been ‘known’ in the way that you know things deep down, when you don’t really consciously want to know them, that seriously mentally ill people, on average, die younger than those without mental illness. But it was an ugly shock… Continue Reading
“New York’s Riker’s Island, Chicago’s Cook County Jail and the Los Angeles County Jail are the largest mental health institutions in the nation. . . 15 percent of the inmates of those three jails are mentally ill, making penal institutions… Continue Reading
Each subsequent publication of the DSM has gotten progressively larger. We can only imagine what sort of tote bag we’ll need for the upcoming DSM-5. Now, this doesn’t bother me for its own sake, really. I don’t go on family… Continue Reading
