MONROE — A mentally ill convicted killer has been temporarily committed to Western State Hospital after serving 20 years in the Special Offender Unit of the state prison at Monroe.
The Department of Corrections says Michael McFarland, who is classified by the state as dangerously mentally ill, was referred Wednesday for civil commitment at the mental hospital for 72 hours.
Twenty years ago, McFarland pleaded guilty to stabbing his mother to death Read the rest of this entry »

Shirley Weber, a volunteer with the Coalition to Save Our Mental Health Centers, said she was shocked by the plan and feared that many severely mentally ill people would lose access to services. Her daughter was diagnosed with a form of schizophrenia 20 years ago at age 21.
“I could lie down and cry, but it wouldn’t do any good,” Weber told Mason at the meeting of the city’s Board of Health, where the cuts were announced.
“Where are they all Read the rest of this entry »

RALEIGH Administrators at a troubled state mental hospital in Goldsboro failed to provide their report of a recent patient death with a pathologist, as required.
A law enacted in July, as well as administrative rules approved in March, mandate that all state institution deaths be reported to a local medical examiner for review. The body is not to be moved without the approval of a pathologist, and the hospital is supposed to share its written Read the rest of this entry »

Published on Saturday, February 07, 2009
With rising suicides and the stress of constant, lengthy deployments, the Army must put the same emphasis on mental fitness as on physical fitness, the Army’s top general said Friday at Fort Bragg.
“When people ask me what keeps me up at night, what I tell them is the thing that I worry most about is the long-term impacts on the mental health of our troops under the repeated combat deployments,” Read the rest of this entry »

MADISON —The Department of Corrections received state approval for plans to expand Taycheedah Correctional Institution’s mental health facilities.
Department officials called the expansion their “number one priority” for the current budget period,
The federal government has threatened to sue the state if it doesn’t makes the mental health facilities at the women’s prison equal to those at men’s prisons in the state.
A year ago, then U.S. Attorney Read the rest of this entry »

At a hearing today, D.C. Superior Court Judge Frederick H. Weisberg read from a letter written by a St. Elizabeths psychologist who said Jacks has “factual and rational understanding” of the court proceedings and the charges against her. Weisberg set Jacks’s jury trial for July 13. Her next hearing was set for Feb. 6.
Jacks, 34, is charged with killing her four daughters, ages 5, 6, 11 and 16.
Tension between Jacks and her court-appointed attorneys Read the rest of this entry »

Published February 9, 2009
People with depression, post-traumatic stress disorder and other mental illnesses are having trouble getting care since Hurricane Ike closed many of the county’s treatment facilities, health workers say.
Since the hurricane struck Sept. 13 and disrupted mental health services, patients with psychosis and suicidal thoughts travel to a Houston hospital to receive treatment. Some wait for days in the emergency room at Read the rest of this entry »

CONCORD — Several off the 546 adults who participated in a new consumer survey about the state’s mental health system had positive things to report. One person said their community mental health center “changed my life by allowing me to get ’stabilized’ to really begin to heal myself back to where I was before I collapsed … .”
Others had negative experiences to report when it came quality of treatment, services, accessibility and staffing.
Read the rest of this entry »

By Mike Adams, January 16, 2009 | Key concepts:
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Have you ever seen a dark, horrifying psychiatric ward in a Hollywood movie? You know, the kind where the patients are abused by hospital workers, overdosed with medications to keep them sedated, and then dumped on the streets when the insurance money runs out? That’s no Hollywood fiction: It’s the way psychiatric hospitals are run in the state of Georgia.
The U.S. Justice Department launched Read the rest of this entry »

BUTNER, N.C. —
Inspectors have cleared a North Carolina hospital for Medicare and Medicaid funding after finding violations there last month.
Central Regional Hospital officials said Friday that inspectors from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid reported that the hospital’s shortcomings had been cleaned up.
Inspectors identified burned out light bulbs and fire protection system deficiencies at Dorothea Dix Hospital in Raleigh and a Read the rest of this entry »