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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...