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What more can I say about the mental disorder of loving cats that hasn’t already been said? Not much, but I will share with you the following story showing you just how far the problem can go. How far? All the way to the psych ward. (After being locked in a loony bin for trying to save the feline when it got stuck in a building wall, cat lover Chris Muth has lost his home, his job and even his girlfriend. The trouble started last week, when

The House and Senate reached agreement on a policy framework for legislation that would require employers and health insurers to put mental-health coverage on par with that for physical maladies. Details of the agreement are expected to be set this week, and a bipartisan group of lawmakers is seeking funding for the measure, which would cost the government an estimated $1.3 billion over five years and $3.4 billion over 10 years, mainly because of lost tax revenue. Leading lawmakers such as Sen. Edward Kennedy (D., Mass.) hope to push the bill through Congress and send it to the White House...

Sen. Barack Obama clarified his position today on mental-health exceptions to late-term abortions, saying he supports such exceptions and that comments he made during a recent magazine interview shouldn't be interpreted as opposing them.

WASHINGTON, June 17, 2008 – Mental Health practitioners nationwide are donating their time and services to provide free, confidential counseling to military people and their families. “Combat affects everyone in one way or another,” explained Dr. Barbara Romberg in an “ASY Live” interview on BlogTalkRadio. “Most people react when exposed to a situation where there are extreme or horrific events; it is a human reaction to abnormal situations.” ASY Live is part of the Defense Department’s America Supports You program, which connects citizens and companies with servicemembers and their families serving at home and abroad. Romberg, founder and president...

We've all goofed up and flubbed up things we've previously done time and again. It turns out the root of these brain farts may be a special kind of abnormal brain activity that begins up to 30 seconds before a mistake even happens. The solution to such screw-ups could be a kind of mind-reading hat, a device to predict and even prevent mindless errors that can threaten lives. When people blunder after performing the same task over and over, scientists had suspected that such lapses were due to momentary hiccups in concentration. Still, little was known about what the brain...

WASHINGTON, April 17, 2008 – A study released today shows that nearly 20 percent of Iraq and Afghanistan veterans report symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder or major depression, findings that military health officials called “very consistent” with their own. Army Col. Loree K. Sutton, director of the Defense Center of Excellence for Traumatic Brain Injury/Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, addresses the findings and recommendations of a new RAND study on brain injury and stress disorders in our troops serving in Afghanistan and Iraq, during a media roundtable in the Pentagon, April 17, 2008. Defense Dept. photo by R. D. Ward...

WASHINGTON, March 18, 2008 – Help for servicemembers coping with the effects of wartime service is just a phone call or a mouse click away, thanks to a nationwide network of mental health professionals. “Give an Hour” is a nonpartisan, nonprofit organization that has created a national network of mental health professionals providing free counseling services to returning veterans and their loved ones, according to Barbara Romberg, the group’s founder and president. “The participating mental health professionals will offer a wide range of services including individual, marital and family therapy, substance abuse counseling, and treatment for post traumatic stress...

When the Gallup pollsters asked Americans what they thought about their own mental health, they were intrigued by the difference between Democrats and Republicans. While 58 percent of Republicans reported having excellent mental health, only 38 percent of Democrats described themselves that way. The study was no surprise to D. Lyle H. Rossiter, Jr., a noted psychiatrist and author of a controversial book that makes the clinical case liberalism is a mental illness. "Based on strikingly irrational beliefs and emotions, modern liberals relentlessly undermine the most important principles on which our freedoms were founded," says Dr. Lyle Rossiter, author of...

High on Mount Sinai, Moses was on psychedelic drugs when he heard God deliver the Ten Commandments, an Israeli researcher claimed in a study published this week. Such mind-altering substances formed an integral part of the religious rites of Israelites in biblical times, Benny Shanon, a professor of cognitive psychology at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem wrote in the Time and Mind journal of philosophy. "As far Moses on Mount Sinai is concerned, it was either a supernatural cosmic event, which I don't believe, or a legend, which I don't believe either, or finally, and this is very probable, an...

WASHINGTON, Jan. 28, 2008 – Army Col. (Dr.) Loree Sutton is a woman on a mission. Army Col. (Dr.) Loree Sutton, chief of the newly created Defense Center of Excellence for Psychological Health and Traumatic Brain Injury, sits in her temporary Rosslyn, Va., office suite. The Defense Department created the center in its effort to step up the quality of care for wounded warriors and their families. Photo by Fred W. Baker III  (Click photo for screen-resolution image);high-resolution image available. The military psychiatrist has, for the last month, ricocheted across the Capital Beltway landscape and beyond, setting up a Defense...

WASHINGTON, Jan. 16, 2008 – Servicemembers returning from deployment and their families can find help readjusting to their lives at home through traditional and holistic therapies offered by a long-established Colorado group. For more than 30 years, Lost and Found Inc. has specialized in providing intervention and rehabilitation treatment for families that have run out of options, said Linda Olson, the organization’s development manager. Recently, however, the organization developed a program geared toward military families. “(We) launched a holistic mental health outreach to active military (personnel) and their families in fall 2007,” she said. The program focuses primarily on...

Before President Bush left Washington for the Mideast, he signed into law the first major federal gun control measure in more than 13 years. If the new law had been in effect last April, it might have prevented the Virginia Tech shooter, Seung-Hui Cho, from buying a weapon at a gun store.

Academics, musicians, even poker champs use pills to sharpen their minds, legally. Labs race to develop even more. Forget sports doping. The next frontier is brain doping. As Major League Baseball struggles to rid itself of performance-enhancing drugs, people in a range of other fields are reaching for a variety of prescription pills to enhance what counts most in modern life. Despite the potential side effects, academics, classical musicians, corporate executives, students and even professional poker players have embraced the drugs to clarify their minds, improve their concentration or control their emotions. "There isn't any question about it -- they...

Republicans are significantly more likely than Democrats or independents to rate their mental health as excellent, according to data from the last four November Gallup Health and Healthcare polls,” Frank Newport of Gallup informs us: "...Fifty-eight percent of Republicans report having excellent mental health, compared to 43 percent of independents and 38 percent of Democrats. This relationship between party identification and reports of excellent mental health persists even within categories of income, age, gender, church attendance, and education."

Since so many blogs deal with hygiene of the mind, body and spirit it's difficult to get through even a few without being brought to the brink of self destruction by tales of obsession, compulsion, emotional angst and exasperation. As the father of a fourteen-year-old daughter I often sink into self reflection about the meaning of life; whether life has any meaning and the most important existential question facing fathers of adolescent young ladies: Is life too short, or is life too long?

WASHINGTON, Nov. 8, 2007 – The departments of Defense and Veteran Affairs have teamed up to improve access to mental health care services to better assist servicemembers, veterans and families, a senior U.S. military officer said here today. The two departments are addressing concerns surfaced by some servicemembers about lengthy waiting times for mental health care appointments, said Air Force Col. Joyce Adkins, a psychologist with the Force Health Protection and Readiness directorate at the Defense Department’s Health Affairs office. “We are clarifying the access time or the wait time that people have for appointments, and this is something...

Ms Owl-the alter ego of a good friend who works with the developmentally disabled-shared this parable today.

Didn't see one up, but Matthews has been giving me too many straight lines to pass up on!!!

Democratic presidential candidate Dennis Kucinich questioned President Bush's mental health in light of comments he made about a nuclear Iran precipitating World War III. "I seriously believe we have to start asking questions about his mental health," Kucinich, an Ohio congressman, said in an interview with The Philadelphia Inquirer's editorial board on Tuesday. "There's something wrong. He does not seem to understand his words have real impact"

Left-handers more at risk of mental illness By Laura Clout Last Updated: 1:49am BST 31/07/2007 Left-handed people may have an increased risk of developing schizophrenia, scientists have found. An international group of scientists, led by a team at Oxford University, have identified a gene that seems to increase the chance of being left-handed. The researchers said that the same gene - called LRRTM1 - may slightly increase the risk of developing the brain disorder. Schizophrenia is a highly complex condition that results in impaired perception and thought, it affects around one in every 100 people. Although little is known about...

...But did you know that the Los Angeles County Jail houses the largest psychiatric population in the country? That's not justice. That's emblematic of a national emergency. Before the 1960s, people with mental illnesses were generally cared for in institutional settings, mostly state-run psychiatric facilities. Many advocates correctly saw this as "warehousing" people who could be cared for in less restrictive settings. Federal legislation and the courts powered a move toward deinstitutionalization, calling on states and counties to provide resources for social services, vocational rehabilitation and treatment services. The introduction of effective antipsychotic medications also drove the trend toward deinstitutionalization....

WASHINGTON, July 6, 2007 – All Illinois National Guard troops returning from deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan now will be screened for traumatic brain injury and get access to post-traumatic stress disorder help under a new, first-of-its-kind state program. Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich and Tammy Duckworth, director of the state’s Department of Veterans Affairs, announced the program earlier this week in Chicago. The program includes mandatory traumatic brain injury screening for all returning National Guard combat veterans, voluntary screening for all other Illinois veterans, and a 24-hour toll-free psychological help line for veterans suffering from PTSD. Blagojevich called the new...

Finding could set the stage for ways to reverse damage in sufferers of the inherited fragile X syndromeIn a case of life imitating art, researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (M.I.T.) reported today that they had successfully reversed mental retardation in mice, just as scientists did in the classic 1966 novel Flowers for Algernon. In the book by Daniel Keyes, scientists use experimental surgery—first tested on a mouse named Algernon—to dramatically boost the intelligence of a mentally retarded janitor named Charlie Gordon. Now M.I.T. scientists report in Proceedings of the National Academy of the Sciences USA that they ameliorated...

The gunman in Monday's massacre at Virginia Tech was Cho Seung-Hui, a 23-year-old senior English major from Centreville, Virginia, Virginia Tech Police Chief Wendell Flinchum said Tuesday. A government official told CNN's Jeanne Meserve that a note has been found indicating Cho showed anger against "rich kids." The official also said Cho had a history of mental illness but gave no details. Cho left a note in his dorm in which he railed against "rich kids," "debauchery" and "deceitful charlatans" on the Virginia Tech campus, The Associated Press reported. The Chicago Tribune, citing unidentified sources, reported that Cho may have...

Mental health screening of all children is the goal of legislation introduced into many state legislatures this year. Typical of these highly controversial bills is the Missouri bill that would require every Missouri school district, in collaboration with "the office of comprehensive child mental health," to develop "a policy of incorporating social and emotional development into the district's educational program." The Missouri bill requires schools to "address teaching and assessing social and emotional skills and protocols for responding to children with social, emotional or mental health problems." The bill also requires the Missouri state board of education to set...

This is a long article of which I am posting only the last few paragraphs. "...At the prison the day before, I watched the inmates drink in Arias’s preaching, too. Abortion-rights leaders would accuse her of manipulation, of instilling guilt in women to serve the anti-abortion movement’s political ends. But Rhonda Arias ministers from the heart; the lack of scientific support for her ideas merely underscores that she is a true believer. Her ardor and influence is better explained, perhaps, by the theory of social contagion, which psychologists use to explain phenomena like the Salem witch trials or the wave...

Roy Richard Grinker, a professor of anthropology at George Washington University, whose 15-year-old daughter is autistic, has just come out with a new book that calls into question what we’ve come to know as the autism “epidemic.” It’s called “Unstrange Minds,” and it makes the argument that the dramatic rise in the incidence of autism in the past few decades is mostly – if not entirely – the result of more and better diagnoses... ...It’s easy to believe: After all, in 2001, the National Institute of Mental Health issued a widely-cited report [pdf] stating that 20 percent of children in...

Source: Washington University in St. Louis Date: January 7, 2007 Imaging Pinpoints Brain Regions That 'See The Future' Science Daily — Human memory, the ability to recall vivid mental images of past experiences, has been studied extensively for more than a hundred years. But until recently, there's been surprisingly little research into cognitive processes underlying another form of mental time travel -- the ability to clearly imagine or "see" oneself participating in a future event. Comparing images of brain activity in response to the "self-remember" and "self-future" event cues, researchers found a surprisingly complete overlap among regions of the brain...

Mental Health Crisis Strains New Orleans Thursday November 9, 2006 12:01 AM By MARY FOSTER Associated Press Writer NEW ORLEANS (AP) - Mental health problems soared after Hurricane Katrina, just as the city's ability to handle them plummeted, creating a crisis so acute that police officers say they take some disturbed people to a destination of last resort - jail. Because of the storm damage, only two of New Orleans' 11 hospitals are fully functioning. What's more, one of the closed facilities is the sprawling Charity Hospital, which police officers had relied on to drop off people at any hour....

A 4th Infantry Division soldier who lost part of his brain to an explosion in Iraq has trouble looking his children in the eyes. It should have been him, not his driver, who was cut in half by the blast, he said. He wanted help with his guilt, but he had to wait weeks to enter a group therapy program. While he waited, he suffered a mental breakdown that required hospitalization. Sgt. 1st Class Charles Hunt, with the 3rd Battalion, 67th Armored Regiment, 4th Brigade Combat Team, broke into tears several times during his 20-minute address Wednesday to a Defense...

The police of Grodna assigned 26-year Paval Yaziesrki, one of the participants of the action of memory for missing journalist Zmitser Zavadski, to a mental house. According to “Deutsche Welle”, UCP activists have held a peaceful action of memory for Zmitser Zavadski in Grodna. No slogans or portraits - only lit candles in hands. But the police officers both uniformed and in muftis, that were 10 times more numerous than the action participants, pushed 8 people in cars and drove them to a police department. Paval Yazierski felt sick at the interrogation in the police office. Questioners tried to force...

Well I guess the spammer from yesterday, who was posting the juvenille obscene spam, was not a kid, as we supposed, but an irate troll who's been banned.

New Yorkers are more than stressed out. Many city residents have "frequent mental distress," according to a study released by the city Health Department. And they are not getting the help they need. Health officials said 1 in 7 adults living in the five boroughs reported frequent mental distress last year, compared with 1 in 10 in the state. The numbers were highest in northern and central Brooklyn, Harlem and the South Bronx. "Depression is a serious and underdiagnosed condition in New York City," said Dr. Lloyd Sederer, deputy commissioner for mental health services. "With so many New Yorkers having...

Global Warming is not Scientific Is Global warming a scientific theory or a belief? http://xtronics.com/reference/globalwarming.htm There are many claiming to be "client scientists", yet (for some strange reason) they don't realize that statistics is not science. Science requires an experimental control. Statistics often provides a scientist a good idea for a hypothesis, but correlations do not prove cause and effect. Furthermore, a computer models are not an experiments in that they again can not discriminate theories into true and false. (They may give one an idea where to poke around, but to claim they "prove" anything is pure fiction...

http://wjz.com/watercooler/watercooler_story_010144726.html Father Of LSD Celebrating 100th Birthday (AP) GENEVA LSD is an unlikely subject for a 100th birthday party. Yet the Swiss chemist who discovered the mind-altering drug and was its first human guinea pig is celebrating his centenary Wednesday — in good health and with plans to attend an international seminar on the hallucinogenic. "I had wonderful visions," Albert Hofmann said, recalling his first accidental consumption of the drug. "I sat down at home on the divan and started to dream," he told the Swiss television network SF DRS. "What I was thinking appeared in colors and in pictures....

A Mental Health Crisis in Georgia By William John Hagan Houston Home Journal 09/10/2005 According to Kristina Simms, a member of the National Alliance for the Mentally Ill (NAMI), an estimated 16% of prisoners in the state of Georgia suffers from mental illness. Over the past decade, the budget for mental health services in state prisons has grown nearly 1,000 percent; while, spending on Georgia's system of state psychiatric hospitals has barely changed. In effect, the State of Georgia has replaced its once thriving psychiatric hospitals with a draconian prison system. Such regression harkens back to a time when mental...

When I was a boy, my parents used to enjoy a comedian named Ronnie Graham. One of his jokes was, "The other day a cat came up to me and said, 'How do I get to Carnegie Hall?' and I said 'Practice, man, practice.' This other cat came up to me and said, 'Meow.' He was a real cat." We talk a lot in our movement about spiritual practices. I am a Religious Science Practitioner; the root word of Practitioner is practice. But why do we practice? Ernest Holmes said that a central concept of our movement is "Perfect God,...

WASHINGTON, July 28 (Xinhuanet) -- About 30 percent of US soldiers coming home from Iraq have developed symptoms of mental disorder three or four months after returning, according to a latest survey. The survey, released Thursday by Lt. Gen. Kevin Kiley, surgeon general of the US Army, said when the troops left combat zones, only 3-5 percent of them were immediately found with serious mental problems, which suggests the disorders have a latent period. The symptoms include anxiety, depression, nightmares, anger andan inability to concentrate. In some severe cases of these symptoms, the soldiers were diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder,...

Doctors in a Cairo mental hospital are holding an Egyptian Christian against his will, telling the man he'll be a permanent resident there until he recants his faith and returns to Islam, reports a leading monitor of Christian persecution. Reminiscent of the tactics of Communists in the USSR who put dissidents in mental hospitals, the forced stay, according to Voice of the Martyrs, has been in effect since January. At that time, the adoptive parents of Gaser Mohammed Mahmoud, 30, committed him to the El-Khanka Hospital after learning he had converted from Islam to Christianity two years earlier. "The hospital...

DULUTH, Ga. — Townspeople who joined in the three-day search for runaway bride Jennifer Wilbanks are getting increasingly peeved that they still have not heard an apology from her. Her attorney said Wilbanks plans to issue a statement Thursday. Jose Armando Nino drives his lawnmower past a billboard with the likeness of runaway bride Jennifer Wilbanks in Duluth, Ga., Tuesday, May 3, 2005. Wilbanks, who had vanished Tuesday, April 26 after saying she was going out jogging, initially told authorities she was abducted. But she later admitted she took a cross-country bus trip to Albuquerque, N.M., to avoid her lavish,...

There has always been bigotry, and sadly there always will be bigotry. Call it the ugly side of human nature, or the worst angels of our race, but some of us will always be consumed with hatred and intolerance for those who are different. Bigotry is a mental disorder if you ask me, a form of delusion where one person can not accept that someone else looks, talks, dresses, or prays differently than they do. It is truly pathetic to watch or listen to a bigot spewing their rank stupidity and generally making a public nuisances of themselves. Perhaps the...

"Imagine taking every single emotion, memory, experience, tablet all into one … and those fighting each other to see who is the victor." - Danny, 22. "It just f… with your head. I had to sleep with a knife under my bed 'cos I used to think people were going to come in and bash me during the night or something. Just for me mull or something, yeah." - Danni, 17. A whole generation of Australians has grown up believing that smoking pot is a harmless pastime. They need to think again. The view of cannabis as a benign drug...

Shocking research reveals teenagers who smoke cannabis are twice as likely to develop psychosis. The ABC's Four Corners TV program tomorrow night airs research that shows the human brain does not fully develop until the early 20s, placing pot-smoking teenagers at risk of suffering significant and permanent damage. The New Zealand research destroys the myth that cannabis is a soft drug and experts say today's hydroponic marijuana is being "morphed" into a different substance from that smoked by the hippie generation. Psychiatrist Dr Andrew Campbell said the widespread use among young people – one in five teenagers uses cannabis –...

A Glimpse Ahead Timothy Snodgrass The Impossible Will Come Alive In 2005 01/28/05 In January of 2004, as we began to intercede for the New Year the Holy Spirit gave us the prophetic slogan, "The Seas will Roar in 2004". This year we were given a new slogan, "The Impossible will come Alive in 2005". As the veil of darkness begins to come down over nations and regions, along with great shakings will come great breakthroughs; signs, wonders, healings and a spectacular release of miracles in impossible circumstances. This year, although we are ultimately poised to gain much ground, there...

Mental Health Charity Calls for Cannabis Probe Sat Jan 29,10:37 AM ET LONDON (Reuters) - A British health charity called on Saturday for an investigation into evidence that smoking cannabis may cause psychosis in people at risk of mental illness. Rethink, which campaigns on behalf of schizophrenia sufferers, said the mental health risks of using cannabis were not widely understood. "There is strong evidence from a wide range of sources that long term and short-term use of cannabis can 'trigger' a psychotic episode of schizophrenia in people who are at high risk of developing schizophrenia --- for instance, people who...

What's the deal with all the dead scientists?

Large numbers of teachers believe themselves incapable of meeting the learning expectations placed on their institutions by the No Child Left Behind Act. Like the characters in Atlas Shrugged, they find themselves having to deal with problems they did not create within the constraints of a system designed to fail. In order to remain in their chosen profession, those caught in the middle must place blame elsewhere in order to find an "out." Those who refuse to "work within the system" disappear. Mediocrity rises to the top and excellence disappears. Public education has cried "wolf" one too many times, claiming...

Tell Congress "NO Money For Mental Health Screening Of Kids!" (actual title) As many of you know—Dr. Laura doesn't lose any sleep over the little disagreements people have with each other. But when it comes to things that are harmful to children—Dr. Laura doesn't play around. So Dr. Laura asks each and every one of you to step up because it’s time for us take on the President of the United States! Did you know there is a presidential initiative called The “New Freedom Commission on Mental Health” and they have issued a report recommending forced mental health screening for...

Some supporters of John Kerry shocked by President Bush's victory in last week's election continue to seek out psychological help, prompting at least one mental-health center to offer free counseling through the end of this year.

Florida and Ohio are clearly going to Bush, but for some reason the Media chattering glasses are unwilling to call them. You should see the forums at Democratic Underground - total emotional meltdown. Maybe when they see how many people are behind Bush, they will realize that their blind faith in Kerry and unfounded hatred for Bush is just not warranted. For those of us who were alive during Reagan years, the media treatment of Bush is all to familiar. GOOOO BUSH!!!!