Monday, October 07, 2002
Mental Illness Awareness Week Mental Illness Awareness Week runs through the 12th, and this NAMI web site includes a welcome letter, MIAW messages, advice on planning an event and working with the media as well as other outreach materials and links to other resources.
Policing the health care industry takes lots of 'Boy Scouts'Philadelphia Inquirer columnist Jeff Gelles on the efforts of Jim Sheehan and others in the U.S. Attorney's Office in Philadelphia - "Sheehan's concern is that money - everything from small gifts and favors for doctors to multimillion-dollar incentives paid by drugmakers to pharmacy benefits managers for putting their products on preferred-drug lists - can improperly influence the choice of what drugs doctors prescribe. He has warned repeatedly that such payments could violate federal fraud or anti-kickback laws." See also
Proposed Subsidies May Constitute Illegal Kickbacks, a
Reuters Medical News story at
Medscape on a drug manufacturer's proposal to set up a nonprofit foundation to help financially needy patients pay for the company's anemia treatment - "which may be illegal, according to a government advisory opinion." [Viewing
Medscape resources requires registration, which is free].
Report on Mental Illness in Canada This report (noted here
last Thursday) is now available online at the Canadian Mental Health Association's web site. The report is "designed to raise the profile of mental illness among government and non-government organizations, and the industry, education, workplace, and academic sectors. It describes major mental illnesses and outlines their incidence and prevalence, causation, impact, stigma, and prevention and treatment. Policy makers will find the information contained in this report valuable for shaping policies and services aimed at improving the quality of life of people with mental illness." The full report, a summary and the 10 individual chapters are all available from this page in
Adobe Acrobat format.
Finding an answer (Washington) Story in the
Spokesman-Review on how "advances in childhood testing, open discussion and creative use of funding and lawsuits give doctors, advocates and parents hope in the struggle over childhood mental illness." The story focuses on "an unusual new computer test" developed by a professor of child psychiatry at Columbia University that asks about suicide, depression, obsessive thoughts and drinking habits. See also
"Lost Children: a look at kids, mental illness" that indexes recent, related stories in the
Spokesman-Review.
Magellan in throes of financial downturn
Philadelphia Inquirer story on the region's largest mental health insurer, which is $1 billion in debt, has "faced a fresh wave of criticism recently from patients, legislators and prosecutors for its treatment decisions" and "has now attracted a more powerful critic: Wall Street." Last week, Magellan's stock fell to a low of 13 cents a share. "Many providers," the story notes, "said they fear that Magellan, which covers five million people in Pennsylvania and nearly three million in New Jersey, could soon declare bankruptcy."
Senator wants federal review of mental health system (Maine) Portland Press Herald story at
MaineToday.com on the request by U.S. Sen. Susan Collins for an investigation by HHS into why "some parents in Maine and other states claim they had to give up custody of mentally ill children to obtain intensive treatment for them." The request comes as part of the response to "Castaway Children: Maine's Most Vulnerable Kids," a series by the
Portland Press Herald/Maine Sunday Telegram that originally ran in August. See also the page at
MaineToday that indexes the three articles in the original series as well as key statistics, background information, maps, charts, tables and more than a dozen follow-up articles.
