Word: schizophrenia
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...since 1968. Yet surprisingly little research has been done on it. According to the National Institute of Mental Health, only $3 million was spent last year for research on ASP, and $31 million was spent on its childhood predecessor, conduct disorder. Yet $132 million was devoted to schizophrenia...
...often left to fend for themselves, with no one to counsel them, monitor their progress or help them find work. That has led to much private suffering but also to some public tragedy, as in the case of Andrew Goldstein, a New York City man suffering from schizophrenia who pushed a woman to her death off a subway platform. Goldstein's murder trial ended in a hung jury this month, but the public mental-health system's neglect of him as a ward has spurred calls for reform. Last week New York Governor George Pataki, whose administration has repeatedly squeezed...
There are still hurdles. Traditional mental-health professionals are more focused today on drug therapies than on social rehabilitation. Ruth Hughes argues that the profession's "belief system" still contains "the idea that people with schizophrenia never get better." Insurance companies have been slow to be convinced that these programs work and will ultimately save money. And many employers still resist hiring the mentally ill. American Postcard's Castaldo recalls telling a fellow businessman "how well I'm doing with handicapped people." The man was interested, Castaldo relates, "but when I mentioned mental health, a wall came down...
Brenda Lee Riley, who suffers from paranoid schizophrenia, hitchhiked with her husband, who had bouts of serious depression, from Ohio to California, where he beat her and sometimes pretended to hang himself. One day he ripped out the gas wall heater and flicked his lighter. Brenda survived by diving out a second-floor window. "Fire is a weird color when you're inside it," she recalls. Years later, though burn scars cover her body, medication has controlled her mental illness and she has become a part-time "life coach" at the Village. She rents her own apartment and hopes...
Defense experts testified that Kinkel was suffering from paranoid schizophrenia and had been fighting voices telling him to kill since he was 12. In 1997 he was found to have depression and anger-management problems and put on Prozac, which he later stopped taking. Critics of the sentence are disturbed that Kinkel's illness was not given due weight and feel that he is unlikely to get proper mental-health care in prison. "It's throwing away a life without regard for the possibility that Kinkel could change or that the circumstances that led to this could be mediated," says...