This is a blog for the Mental Health Policy Class at the George Warren Brown School of Social Work.

June 26, 2008

States turn down US abstinence education grants

Doctors are supposed to prescribe tests and treatments that are medically necessary for their patients. Health insurers are expected to cover that care, while keeping inappropriate expenses in check. But what happens when that process breaks down and sick patients are left to fight for medical care? Each year, thousands of Californians find themselves at odds with their health insurers over whether they, as patients, should get the treatment their doctors prescribed.
Peter Isgro of Santa Cruz is among them. His insurer, Anthem Blue Cross, stopped paying for certain chemotherapy drugs after his cancer progressed, a decision that has been upheld in two appeals. Isgro said he feels like the insurance company is second-guessing his doctor. "If your doctor wants to give you something and they can deny it, that's wrong," he said.

Female circumcision: A tradition steeped in blood

Children as young as five are held down and cut, sometimes with razor blades or broken glass, in a ritual driven by a range of cultural demands, including a desire to demonstrate a girl's virginity on her wedding night. The practice, which survives mainly in 28 countries in East and West Africa, has been targeted as a fundamental human rights violation in recent years by the United Nations and individual states, including the UK. The World Health Organisation estimates that up to 140 million girls and women around the world have suffered some type of genital mutilation, and around three million girls, most of them under 15, undergo the procedure every year.

June 19, 2008

Mentally ill children stuck in hospital limbo (Boston Globe)

Parents and advocates report that in recent weeks across the state, at least a dozen children and teens in crisis - threatening violence to themselves or others - have waited three, five, even seven days in hospital emergency rooms or medical wards for psychiatric beds.
Kelly Rowell, left, diagnosed with developmental disabilities and bipolar disorder, waited for a week in a hospital emergency room. By all accounts, the state has made significant progress toward solving the problem of "stuck kids" - children with mental illness deemed well enough to leave hospital psychiatric units but stuck in them for lack of treatment programs outside.
But while it has gotten easier for children to leave the state's mental health facilities, which should make more beds available, it appears to have gotten harder, in some cases, to get in.

Nearly 100 Japanese commit suicide each day

An average of almost 100 Japanese people killed themselves each day last year, according to figures out today, dealing a serious blow to a government campaign to drastically reduce the suicide rate by 2016. A total of 33,093 people committed suicide in 2007, up 3% from 2006 and the 10th year in a row the number has exceeded 30,000, the national police agency said. The figure is the second highest after the 34,427 recorded suicides in 2003. Depression was identified as the main factor in around a fifth of cases, followed by physical illness and debt. The number of elderly people who killed themselves rose 9% from a year earlier as Japan grapples with a rapidly aging society and rising poverty among pensioners. People aged over 60 made up the biggest individual group of victims, rising to a record high of 36.6% of the total, the agency said.