Medicare Woes Take High Toll on Mentally Ill
The report below on the deprivation of medications for those coping with mental disabilities is particularly disconcerting for me, as I have had students since I began teaching who had symptoms of mental illness -- bi-polarity and schizophrenia -- emerge while in college. When I first began teaching more than three decades ago the prospects were not terribly good for such students -- lithium for bi-polar conditions that was hard to regulate and tempted people to go off medications due to the depressing effects. During the past decade with the new medications all things have changed. Students gotten to proper medications go happily on with their lives -- graduate studies, productive careers, etc.
One of my earliest students has been a tragic instance of the pre-medications experiences. Off medications after struggling with a research job for many years, she committed a minor crime -- stealing checks from an organization that she felt had done her wrong. She ended up in jail where she was taken off medications -- the outside supplier to NYC prisoners shortly thereafter was reported to have been fraudulently skimming and not providing same. She slipped into her non-medicated rage state. The judge presiding over mental illness cases turned out to be an 'if you are a good boy or girl, I will let you out, but if you are rude you stay in jail' type. I saw him in action first hand when I tried to see my student appear before him in the long line of cases being run through and had my observations confirmed by her lawyer -- a classmate who undertook her case at my behest who watched the rotten character of the system as long as he could bear the shared pain.
Now my student is back in the system again -- presumably raging away -- she had her arm badly broken at one point.
The reports on the total disaster that the Bush administration has created with its chaotic reversion to private insurance systems beyond even the ability of experts to figure out -- let alone elderly beginning to lose it or the mentally ill -- obviously designed to maintain the outrageous profits of our increasingly dangerous drug companies . . . ?
What words can express one's outrage and contempt for this one among many Republican cruelties in the name of making the rich a bit richer?
And so it came crashing down in 1929!
..................
Medicare Woes Take High Toll on Mentally Ill
By ROBERT PEAR
Some patients have relapsed after mix-ups in the first
weeks of the new drug benefit kept them from getting their
medications.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/21/politics/21drug.html?th&emc=th
..................
--
"A war is just if there is no alternative, and the resort
to arms is legitimate if they represent your last hope." (Livy)
--
Ed Kent 718-951-5324 (voice mail only) [blind copies]
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One of my earliest students has been a tragic instance of the pre-medications experiences. Off medications after struggling with a research job for many years, she committed a minor crime -- stealing checks from an organization that she felt had done her wrong. She ended up in jail where she was taken off medications -- the outside supplier to NYC prisoners shortly thereafter was reported to have been fraudulently skimming and not providing same. She slipped into her non-medicated rage state. The judge presiding over mental illness cases turned out to be an 'if you are a good boy or girl, I will let you out, but if you are rude you stay in jail' type. I saw him in action first hand when I tried to see my student appear before him in the long line of cases being run through and had my observations confirmed by her lawyer -- a classmate who undertook her case at my behest who watched the rotten character of the system as long as he could bear the shared pain.
Now my student is back in the system again -- presumably raging away -- she had her arm badly broken at one point.
The reports on the total disaster that the Bush administration has created with its chaotic reversion to private insurance systems beyond even the ability of experts to figure out -- let alone elderly beginning to lose it or the mentally ill -- obviously designed to maintain the outrageous profits of our increasingly dangerous drug companies . . . ?
What words can express one's outrage and contempt for this one among many Republican cruelties in the name of making the rich a bit richer?
And so it came crashing down in 1929!
..................
Medicare Woes Take High Toll on Mentally Ill
By ROBERT PEAR
Some patients have relapsed after mix-ups in the first
weeks of the new drug benefit kept them from getting their
medications.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/21/politics/21drug.html?th&emc=th
..................
--
"A war is just if there is no alternative, and the resort
to arms is legitimate if they represent your last hope." (Livy)
--
Ed Kent 718-951-5324 (voice mail only) [blind copies]
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/CollegeConversation
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/PeaceEfforts
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/EndingPoverty
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/440neighborhood
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/StudentConcerns
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/AcademicFreedom
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/PrivacyRights
http://BlogByEdKent.blogspot.com/
http://www.bloggernews.net
posted by Ed Kent at 7:32 AM
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