Inside Venezuela’s Crumbling Mental Hospitals

The state-run El Pampero Hospital in Venezuela has almost no drugs left for its tormented patients, let alone food and clothing, amid the nation’s economic crisis.

The New York Times has an excellent photo spread illustrating the horrific conditions in Venezuela’s mental “health” system.

In the beginning of the semester, we talked about the horrible conditions in asylums from the middle ages until the advent of the moral therapy movement. Things were still pretty bad until the development of psychotropic drugs that could treat the symptoms of mental illness.

Because Venezuela’s national economy is in the dumps, medication is not purchased for the hospital and the patients are floridly symptomatic. It is truly a nightmare, and a good reminder of how far we have come in treating mental illness.

The worst part is:

The Venezuelan government denies that its public hospitals are suffering from shortages, and has refused multiple offers of international medical aid.

Source: Inside Venezuela’s Crumbling Mental Hospitals

Mentally ill inmate who spent 1,001 days in solitary confinement now feels alone outside

The Miami Herald has an interesting article about one recently released inmate who spent nearly his entire three year term in solitary. Worse yet, he had mental illnesses that were exacerbated by solitary.

In Abnormal Psychology we were discussing the effects of deinstitutionalization and the shift to community care, but the lack of community care shifting mental illness to the streets. Another big location that people with mental illness wind up is prison. The article makes the point that community mental health services are underfunded and lacking. We see the cost here.

Devon Davis was one of more than 2,000 North Carolina inmates released each year after being imprisoned with a mental illness. He is one of hundreds released directly from solitary confinement within a state prison. They emerge from a cell roughly the size of a parking space into a world they sometimes know little about.

Source: Mentally ill inmate who spent 1,001 days in solitary confinement now feels alone outside | Miami Herald

Making sure we consider the biopsychosocial model

The NY Times has a good Op-Ed piece by George Makari on the problem of mental health being reduced to biological processes. It argues that we need to be careful to not dismiss the power of psychological and social factors in mental health and illness. This is the “biopsychosocial” model I refer to frequently in class. He uses the 2015 study by Kane, et al. that I presented in class as an example of the strength of a multi-modal understanding of mental illness and treatment. He also lambasts the NIH for making new rules that require grants to include biomarkers and neurological circuit investigations in future researcn.

clinical pragmatism has seriously declined in the United States, as psychiatry has veered toward pharmacology

Link to the article: Psychiatry’s Mind-Brain Problem – The New York Times.

Personalizing Mental Illness

In Stereotyping and Prejudice, we just finished studying stigma, and mental illness is heavily stigmatized. A recent article in the NY Times is about a project to use oral history to help personalize the experience of mental illness. As we studied, the more you can provide individuating information, the more stereotypes can be weakened in person perception.

One thing I learned was that as soon as you mentioned the word, people stopped seeing the person. They just saw the diagnosis and a collection of symptoms.

Link to the article in the NY Times Well blog.