Word: mentalities
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Gerald Minsk used to drop acid and smoke pot to help quell paranoid delusions that Boston's North End mafiosi were conspiring against him. Yes, it's crazy to take hallucinogens to soothe your hallucinations. But that's what untreated mental illness does to you. It can also leave you jobless and sleeping under the Boston University bridge. That's what happened to Minsk, anyway, in the 1970s. For years, his bipolar disorder was virtually ignored as he cycled in and out of jails, mental hospitals and community centers, none of which took the time, or had the resources...
Millions of Americans are treated the same way. As a rule, mentally ill people are no more likely than their neighbors to be violent. But untreated mental illness can have horrific results. Andrew Goldstein asked to be hospitalized in New York because he was terrified of phantom voices. Instead, budget-conscious officials most often referred him to short-term emergency care. Last year, in a psychotic state, he shoved a woman from a subway platform to her death under the wheels of a train...
...admits, "We try to use medication for the minimum amount of time possible. And with a younger child, we're more cautious about using medication because we have less research concerning both the effectiveness and the long-term consequences and side effects." Says Michael Faenza, president of the National Mental Health Association: "I feel very strongly that no child should be receiving medication without counseling. Medication is just one spoke in the wheel...
...young bodies, most doctors in the field argue that the drugs are a blessing to kids in pain. Says Duke's March, who is doing a comparative study of the benefits of Prozac and cognitive-behavior therapy: "My clinical experience is that it's worse to risk a major mental illness as a child than to be on medication. If you weigh the risks against the benefits, the benefits are probably going...
...doctor's office. And it doesn't take a lot of acting up for a restless teenager to attract professional attention. On a website sponsored by Channel One, a television network for school-age youth, a recent posting written with the help of the National Association for Mental Illness classified the following behaviors as possible symptoms of manic depression in teens: "increased talking--the adolescent talks too much," "distractibility," "unrealistic highs in self-esteem--for example, a teenager who feels specially connected...