Word: nimh
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...seven cases in Santa Clara County attracted the attention of local drugenforcement officials and Parkinson's researchers at the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH), who joined the hunt to identify the deadly ingredient in samples of the drug obtained by police. Their task was made easier by an alert toxicologist at the county crime laboratory, who recalled the 1977 case of a Maryland graduate student who had developed Parkinson's symptoms after injecting himself with a home-brewed opiate. The student had been trying to produce MPPP, a substance similar to the pain-killer Demerol, but had accidentally created...
...scientists quickly turned to the task. For years research on Parkinson's disease has been limited by the lack of an animal model on which to test new drugs and treatments. Would MPTP induce Parkinson's in animals? The answer, NIMH Researchers Sanford Markey and R. Stanley Burns soon discovered, was no in rats but yes in monkeys. Says Markey: "That was probably the biggest breakthrough in this story...
...National Institute of Mental Health survey [BEHAVIOR, Oct. 15] provides important data on the prevalence of mental-health problems. However, various physical disorders can cause symptoms of anxiety, depression and even schizophrenia, and should be ruled out before a psychiatric diagnosis is made. Since the NIMH survey was based on interviews, without thorough physical examinations, the study's conclusion that one in five has a diagnosable mental disorder may be an overestimate. It is doubtful whether all those "troubled minds" identified by the NIMH study need professional help from mental-health specialists...
Among the other NIMH findings...
...Nova Scotia in 1952, said that 57% of those interviewed had a disorder during a lifetime and 20% were in need of psychiatric attention at the time of the survey. "The most important thing is not what the overall rate is," says Dr. Darrel Regier, director of the NIMH survey, "but that we now know what the distribution of disorders is. This is establishing a baseline for future research...