Monday, November 11, 2002

Medscape Psychiatry Journal Scan, October 2002
"Journal Scan is the clinician's guide to the latest clinical research findings in the American Journal of Psychiatry, The Lancet, Archives of General Psychiatry, Journal of Clinical Psychiatry, and Journal of Clinical Psychopharmacology. Short summaries of feature articles include links to the article abstracts and full text, when available." [Viewing Medscape resources requires registration, which is free].  
  

Arkansas Democrat-Gazette Examines New Medicaid Rules for Children's Mental Health Care
Item at the Kaiser Network Daily Health Policy Report on the newspaper's investigation of a state contract with First Health Services of Arkansas, a subsidiary of Illinois-based First Health Group, intended to determine which requests by providers for children's mental health treatments were medically necessary -- "but providers say required paperwork under the system is 'too time-consuming,' denial of payment 'has become routine' and certain diagnoses and treatments are 'unfairly targeted'.."  
  

Police, fire do their part to deal with mental health crisis (Minnesota)
Minneapolis Star Tribune story on the "effort by police, fire and medical personnel and government officials to deal with a crisis in the treatment of people who suffer from mental illness....The situation is exacerbated by the fact that broadly defined estimates place the number of mentally ill adults in the metro area in the hundreds of thousands, placing a strain at levels of the system from emergency rooms to officers on the street."  
  

New court helping mothers get clean and sober (Alaska)
Anchorage Daily News story on "the newest of Anchorage's specialty courts...... Family Care Court. It serves mothers whose drug or alcohol problems are so severe that the state has stepped in to protect their children, often by taking them away."  
  

Groups lament lack of facilities for chronic alcoholics (New Zealand)
Story at Stuff - "Chronic alcoholics are drinking themselves to death because of a lack of local treatment facilities and a shortfall in funding for people to get treatment outside their own area, welfare groups and clinicians say."  
  

Hidden epidemic: Substance abuse's toll on seniors
Seattle Times story on the "hidden health epidemic" - "Alcohol abuse and prescription-drug misuse are challenging millions of older Americans and likely to get worse as baby boomers age. The problem's current toll — social, economic and medical — and the implications for the future are prompting a push for education, screening and early treatment."  
  

Mental health rights fears (UK)
BBC story - "The government has been warned that proposals in its Draft Mental Health Bill could infringe the human rights of patients. The joint House of Commons and House of Lords committee on Human Rights say they have "serious reservations" about some aspects of the draft measures which would in general improve safeguards on the human rights of patients."  
  

Mental Health Bill and public safety (UK)
Column in The Times - "Sir, David Blunkett’s assertion in a recent speech to the Zito Trust that the draft Mental Health Bill will promote better services and improve public safety is very hard to justify. By increasing the use of compulsion, and imposing it on a wider group of people, the Government’s proposals would damage irreparably the trust between professionals and patients, and discourage people from seeking treatment in the first place, while doing little to reduce the risk posed by a tiny proportion of people with mental illnesses."