Depression

British Ruling Pins Blame on Social Media for Teenager’s Suicide

In January 2019, Mr. Russell went public with Molly’s story. Outraged that his young daughter could view such bleak content so easily and convinced that it had played a role in her death, he sat for a TV interview with the BBC that resulted in front-page stories across British newsstands.

Mr. Russell, a television director, urged the coroner reviewing Molly’s case to go beyond what is often a formulaic process, and to explore the role of social media. Mr. Walker agreed after seeing a sample of Molly’s social media history.

That resulted in a yearslong effort to get access to Molly’s social media data. The family did not know her iPhone passcode, but the London police were able to bypass it to extract 30,000 pages of material. After a lengthy battle, Meta agreed to provide more than 16,000 pages from her Instagram, such a volume that it delayed the start of the inquest. Merry Varney, a lawyer with the Leigh Day law firm who worked on the case through a legal aid program, said it had taken more than 1,000 hours to review the content.

What they found was that Molly had lived something of a double life. While she was a regular teenager to family, friends and teachers, her existence online was much bleaker.

In the six months before Molly died, she shared, liked or saved 16,300 pieces of content on Instagram. About 2,100 of those posts, or about 12 per day, were related to suicide, self-harm and depression, according to data that Meta disclosed to her family. Many accounts she interacted with were dedicated to sharing only depressive and suicidal material, often using hashtags that linked to other explicit content.

Many posts glorified inner struggle, hiding emotional duress and telling others “I’m fine.” Molly went on binges of liking and saving graphic depictions of suicide and self-harm, once after 3 a.m., according to a timeline of her Instagram usage.

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Counselors And Cops Working Together Can Save Lives

Co-responder teams of police and mental health experts can better meet the needs of people in mental health crisis.

One night last June, 22-year-old Christian Glass called 911 for help with his stranded car. A little over an hour later he was dead.

Asked about weapons, Glass mentions tools his family says he used as an amateur geologist.

“I have two knives and a hammer, um, and a rubber mallet. I guess that’s a weapon?,” Glass said. “I’m not dangerous. I will keep my hands completely visible.”

But when deputies in Colorado’s Clear Creek County show up, Glass tells them he’s too scared to get out of his car.

Then they see the knife.

Over about the next hour, officers try to get him out.

Glass smiles — even makes a heart with his hands — but stays in the car.

Officers seem to realize glass is having a mental health crisis. A Colorado State Patrol sergeant notes Glass hasn’t done anything wrong.

“If there’s no crime and he’s not suicidal, homicidal or a great danger, then there’s no reason to contact him,” the sergeant says.

But for reasons that are unclear and now under investigation, officers eventually smash the car window.

What happens next is chaos, and then tragedy.

Officers shoot beanbags and tasers.

Finally, a deputy opens fire.

The next moments are too disturbing for TV. Even the police appear stunned.

Glass’ family says he was a gentle soul, an artist who had bouts of depression. His parents blame police for escalating a situation they say was never truly dangerous.

“We’re a very gentle, quiet family,” said Christian’s mother Sally Glass. “So that level of aggression and those officers really wasn’t in his world. He would have really struggled with that, you know, that would have been outside his comfort zone even to be spoken like that and treated like that.”

Nationwide last year, 101 people “behaving erratically” or having a mental health crisis were killed by police. What happened to Glass is exactly what many police departments across the country say they’re trying harder to prevent.

In Douglas County Colorado, Zachary Zepeski and Kalie Bryant are part of an innovative partnership. He’s a sheriff’s deputy, and she’s a licensed professional counselor with a master’s degree in mental health counseling.

They’re part of what’s called a co-responder team. Handling not only mental health calls, but as their shift starts, also checking in on people they’ve dealt with before.

“Sounds like they are concerned she may be ‘slipping’ is the word they use, again, into a mental health crisis,” Bryant said. “So we are just following up to see how she’s doing. To see what support we can offer her.”

Next, they get called to help with someone who appears to be in crisis.

As they arrive, a sergeant tells them the man may still be inside his home.

The man has committed no crime, but Zepeski and Bryant need to make sure he’s OK.

But rather than barge inside, potentially making things worse, the team holds off.

“We don’t try to go in an agitate a situation anymore,” Zepeski said. “There was no crime. The things that were broken were his own, you can break your own stuff. So that’s why we didn’t really force the issue.”

Eventually, they find out the man already left. But their work is just beginning.

“Now is kind of a waiting game,” Zepeski said. “We will keep this one on our radar so now we’ll know if something happens at this address again, that we have an idea of what’s going on inside that apartment.”

“I feel like that we have the ability to develop a relationship with these people and truly get to know them so that they know that they can call for us if they need it,” Bryant said.

In one year across Colorado, teams like this one responded to 15,000 calls and made nearly 8,000 follow-up visits.

Douglas County Sheriff Tony Spurlock says before “co-responder” teams, people having a mental health crisis often ended up behind bars.

“We’re talking misdemeanor crimes, and these people were in the jail,” Spurlock said. “Not a place for someone who has a mental health disorder. We’re not equipped in the jail to treat them, or quite frankly even to house them.”

But more than half of Colorado’s counties do not have “co-responder” teams, including Clear Creek where Christian Glass was killed. His family wants officers held accountable.

“Christian’s killing is a stain on Clear Creek County and on Colorado,” said Christian’s father Simon Glass. “It was a murder by a Colorado official. It cannot stand.”

Newsy reached out to the Clear Creek County Sheriff’s Department. They declined to give is an interview or statement. The district attorney and state investigators are now reviewing the case to see if any officers should face criminal charges. And the FBI and Justice Department tell Newsy they are aware of the case and will “take appropriate action” if they find evidence of federal criminal civil rights violations.

Source: newsy.com

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Breakthrough Device Could Ease Deep Depression

A very small group of just several hundred Americans is trying an at-home medical treatment involving electrical stimulation of part of the brain.

It looks a little “weird science.”

But the headpiece that Susan Meiklejohn dons daily is giving her head peace— peace and relief from the deep, debilitating depression from which she has suffered most of her life.

SUSAN MEIKLEJOHN: I had a very, very stressful — overwhelmingly stressful — childhood. I had a violent father. And at 11, was the first time I had suicidal ideation.

NEWSY’S JASON BELLINI: How old are you now?

MEIKLEJOHN: 68. So, I’ve never gotten past the ideation phase. I’ve never attempted suicide. But I certainly have been enmeshed in that ideation.

Meiklejohn, a retired college professor and amateur artist, is one of nearly three million adults in America with depression that does not respond to medication. Now she’s one of a very small group — just several hundred — trying an at-home medical treatment involving electrical stimulation of part of the brain.

BELLINI: How many medications have you tried?

MEIKLEJOHN: I’d say 10. … I have always been very, very eager to do what it takes to get out of this.

So she tried ketamine—most commonly used in anesthesia—forking over $16,000 out of pocket to see whether the new psychedelic treatment, now being offered in hundreds of U.S. clinics, could provide her with some relief. It did, but not for long.

“It makes you feel great,” Meiklejohn said. “So, that lasted for about three days. And then it’s right back again.”

Back again to suicidal ideation. Then, a few months ago, Meiklejohn heard about a new treatment protocol — one she could try at home.

It’s provided by a team led by Leigh Charvet, who is a neuropsychologist at NYU Langone Health. She’s pioneering research in transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) as a treatment for a wide range of neurological disorders, depression among them.

“I have to say, of all of our experience with tDCS, the response in the depression trial has been absolutely remarkable,” Charvet said.

And the treatment is considered low-risk enough to let Newsy’s Jason Bellinni try it, powered up.

At his lab, at the City College of New York, Marom Bikson develops cutting edge methods of “neuromodulation.”

“Neuromodulation as a field is the use of devices to deliver energy in a controlled way to the nervous system to change the body,” he said. “When you think something, when you feel something, it’s all electricity. We’re adding electricity into that mix. So, it’s sort of, maybe not a surprise that an electrical organ is sensitive to electricity coming in.”

BELLINI: What do you think is most exciting right now when it comes to this field generally?

MAROM BIKSON: One is more and more sophisticated technologies that can deliver energy to the nervous system in a more intentional and targeted way. So, more and more specificity.

To demonstrate, Bikson suited Bellini up for an experiment to see if targeted electrical stimulation can improve one’s concentration while doing a boring, repetitive task.

BELLINI: Is there a sweet spot you’re trying to hit?

“This electrode here is roughly over a part of your brain called the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex,” Bikson said.

That’s an area of the brain associated with problem solving, attention switching, memory management and inhibition.

BIKSON: Now, you’re at the full current, can you feel it?

BELLINI: I feel the itchiness, that’s for sure.

Itchiness, where the electrode touched Bellini’s scalp, which he says went away within a few minutes. He had no other sensation beyond that.

As far as the game, as shown to Bellini in an analysis afterward, stimulation appeared to improve his performance a bit. Depression treatments target the same brain area as that experiment.

“We have developed a hypothesis that this energy may not directly affect the neurons of the brain, but actually affect the blood vessels in the brain,” Bikson said.

They headed over to an MRI machine, where they set Bellini up to capture what the stimulation does inside his head.

The areas in red showed an increase in blood flow. But how that may impact people with depression and other neurological diseases remains a medical mystery.

BIKSON: It works, but it also works on the most difficult people, people who have been failed by conventional medicines.

BELLINI: But not everyone?

BIKSON: But not everyone. And then, there’s the opportunity, right? Just like with medications, with neuromodulation, you’re thinking, “How can I make this work better? How can I capture the people who did not respond? And even for the people who did respond, can I do better for them still?”

Today, another approach to stimulation, called “repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation,” or repetitive TMS, is both FDA approved and widely available. But it requires a series of sessions over days or weeks. And larger studies are needed to determine how long improvements last.

“I’m very interested in creating something that is as effective as that. But you can use it at home still under prescription,” Bikson said.

NYU is using a device developed in partnership with Bikson that can be positioned properly remotely.

BELLINI: You haven’t done this long enough to know how long it will last?

LEIGH CHARVET: No. … We know that more is better. We don’t know if you reach a plateau or If you have remission in depression. Do you need to continue or do you need to taper it?

Meiklejohn has been using it daily, while meditating, for more than three months.

BELLINI: When did you start to notice changes?

MEIKLEJOHN: I’d say after about three weeks.

BELLINI: Has the suicide ideation gone away?

MEIKLEJOHN: Not completely, no. You know, when I dip, I dip. … The difference is, I bounce back in a day or two.

Meiklejohn hopes she’ll continue to be a portrait of hope.

Newsy’s mental health initiative “America’s Breakdown: Confronting Our Mental Health Crisis” brings you deeply personal and thoughtfully told stories on the state of mental health care in the U.S. Click here to learn more.

Source: newsy.com

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Mental Health America: Texas Ranks Last In Mental Health Care Access

Canutillo Independent School District and Kingsville Independent School District try to get a handle on mental health care for students in need.

The old saying is “everything is bigger in Texas” — including its problems.

Mental health ranks atop.

In the wake of the Uvalde massacre, conservative politicians are waving away talk of gun control and stressing that mental health is the real culprit. And in boastful Texas, mental health is a big problem.

Mental Health America ranks Texas dead last in access to mental health care. The Kaiser Family Health Foundation found that Texans suffer depression at higher-than-average rates.

In data released by the Texas Education Agency, more than half of Lone Star schools don’t have a psychologist or access to telehealth.

Texas has also opted out of Medicaid expansion under the Affordable Care Act. In various studies, that amounts to tens of billions of dollars in federal funding, which could insure more than a million Texans and provide reimbursements for mental health professionals.

Canutillo Independent School District is north of El Paso, Texas. It’s like Uvalde, with a supermajority Hispanic population and a mental health desert. It’s chief concern is access for those services for its 6,200 students

“So, one of the things that is most important is social workers, counselors and prevention specialists working together,” social worker Rosario Olivera said.

The school district is Title I funded, meaning more than 40% of its students fall below the poverty line.

Administrators grappled with various problems across 10 schools, like how to get students access to medical care and in a pandemic, access to mental health and more counselors.

“We do the best we can do to service children of highest need,” Olivera continued. “However, it’s the same thing as with counselors. The ratio is very high.”

In Canutillo, it meant a pilot program of bringing in social workers and social work interns from the University of Texas El Paso.

“For every campus that has 350 students, you need one counselor. The majority of our campuses have 500 and above,” Canutillo Independent School District Director of Student Support Services Monica Reyes said.

Another glaring indicator in mental health access is poverty.

“This is typically what you’ll see: A mobile home with six or seven family members in it,” said Francisco Mendez with Familia Triunfadores.

In the colonias of San Elizario, access to mental health is a question of whether there are any therapists close by. But oftentimes, the answer is no.

“It’s really difficult for them,” Mendez said. “They’ll have to drive at least 35 miles to El Paso.”

In Kingsville, Texas, the schools have one mental health professional for more than 2,800 students.

Tracy Warren is a licensed school specialist psychologist, or LSSP. She’s an intern completing her doctorate. The challenge for Kingsville Independent School District is holding on to her and getting more people like her.

“We are trying to let everybody know how important mental health is and that if we don’t have the mental health foundation, the education is not going to take place,” Warren said.

She is the front line. The school district leans on nonprofits to help kids outside of class.

“There are a lot more anxious students this year than I’ve ever seen,” Warren continued. “We actually had a student that was at one of our campuses — he’s 4, going into Pre-K. First day of school, he stopped outside to count the police cars that he can see to ensure that he was safe before he came into school.”

The small school district’s leader, Superintendent Cissy Reynolds-Perez, says more mental health professionals and counselors need to be trained to work in rural schools.

“It’s very difficult because not everybody wants to come out to this area,” she said. “You know, you have your metropolitan areas, which I’m not saying it’s easier, but there are more resources there.”

At nearby Texas A&M Kingsville, the school has opened an institute for rural mental health.

Steve Bain is the director of the Rural Mental Health Institute. His goal is to create a mental health graduate student counselor pipeline direct to public schools.

“We have an opportunity now to reverse this trend of being last, or toward the last, in terms of accessibility of mental health services,” he said. “Only about 25% of students in K-12 who suffer from depression are getting mental health services. And depression has increased among our student population in the last five to eight years, significantly so.”

In Texas, licensed school specialty psychologists and social workers can be mental health caregivers to emotionally fraught kids, but there is a catch.

“Texas Education Agency has not recognized social workers as TEA employees yet, per se. We don’t have a specific job description, like teachers or counselors do,” Olivera said.

That means school districts miss out on funding and insurance reimbursements when social workers provide mental health care for kids.

Source: newsy.com

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Pop Quiz: Can You Fall In Love With A Fictional Character?

In this segment of “Pop Quiz,” Newsy’s “In The Loop” dives into whether or not you can fall in love with a fictional character.

In 1955, a woman by the pseudonym of “Miss A” wrote in asking for advice about a crush.

The response was: “I don’t know what you learned in college, but you are flunking the course of common sense. You have fallen for a piece of celluloid as unreal as a picture on the wall.”

One year later, that advice column was published again in an academic paper that coined the phrase “parasocial relationship,” which was defined as a “seeming face-to-face relationship between spectator and performer.”

Parasocial relationships have also been characterized as one-sided and basically imaginary, but they feel real, because as an audience member or a reader, we’re spending a lot of time with them.

They have since been the focus of around 250 empirical studies over the past seven decades, and most of them analyze audience relationships with real life media figures: like TV personalities, actors, musicians, or, in more recent years, social media influencers. And some studies have looked specifically at fans of celebrities like Justin Bieber or Elvis Presley. Fun fact: there are still more than 600 active fan clubs dedicated to Elvis Presley.

On a neurological level, we do know that the human brain is pretty good at experiencing imagined stimuli as if they were real. One study found that the auditory cortex in the brain can light up both when hearing a sound and when imagining that sound.

So, it’s not a huge leap to suggest these fictional or “imagined” parasocial crushes might feel like the real thing.

Fewer studies have been conducted on parasocial relationships with fictional characters; but the ones that exist have looked at anime characters, sitcoms like “Modern Family,” readers of the “Twilight” series and, specifically, everyone who had a crush on the fictional vampire Edward Cullen.

In a survey of around 240 women, 44% said the series had no real influence on them, and that it was all just fantasy. But 31% said the series showed them “the type of true love and strong commitment they would like to have in their own romantic relationship.”

Researchers have described parasocial relationships as identity-forming, allowing “adolescents to crystallize their beliefs, preferences and expectations.”

Many researchers do note that parasocial relationships can lead to unrealistic expectations for real-life relationships, but others also saw them as “placeholders” for actual relationships that allowed people to romantically experiment.

Another real-world example of a parasocial relationship is when a man named Akihiko Kondo held an unofficial wedding ceremony to marry the holographic pop star Hatsune Miku. The marriage is not actually legally recognized, but it’s one of many around the world.

Skeptics can look at this as an example of something keeping him from making real-life relationships. In an interview with the New York Times, Kondo says he’s aware of how strange people think his attraction is. And while he knows that Hatsune Miku isn’t real, his feelings are — and he says he was able to pull himself out of depression and find a sense of love and solace because of it.

All of that goes to show that parasocial relationships with fictional characters can, and do have real-world impacts.

Companies have long capitalized on the appeal of parasocial relationships. And video games take this one step further, especially when you look at the entire genre of dating Sims, where players can virtually date fictional characters.

Dating Sims have made an estimated $570 million across several platforms. “Stardew Valley” is one of the most popular ones, letting players date and marry from a pool of 12 fictional characters. And as of this spring, the game has sold over 20 million copies.

The fandoms surrounding these games really confirm a lot of the past studies done on parasocial relationships. Players have described them as venues for escapism that provide a sense of autonomy and emotional safety, and that is especially true for queer gamers.

One person told Huffpost: “I get to live through the experience of not being seen as weird or an outcast for being ‘different’ in my gender identity and sexuality.”

It seems that our emotional attachments to fiction and pop culture are very real and can even have a purpose from giving us ways to form our emotional identities, providing venues for emotional escapism, as well as a way to explore and feel a real sense of love.

Source: newsy.com

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Teen Suicide Crisis: Colorado Parents Work To Reduce State’s High Rate

Parents are sharing their tragedies in hopes of reducing suicide in Colorado. It’s the No. 1 cause of death for kids and young adults in the state.

Vicky Goodwin says February 4, 2021, is the day her world changed forever.

“It was a Thursday morning. I got up, took my dog for a walk. I remember walking in,” she said. “Then, I walked down the hall to Jonathan’s room and opened the door, and he wasn’t in his bed, and I walked into his room and then I found him.”

Jonathan Goodwin was just 15.

“Jonathan was incredibly bright, funny, quirky, a wonderful friend. He was a twin. He and his brother were really close,” Goodwin continued.

But for reasons he kept hidden, Jonathan took his own life. His mom says nobody knows why.

“It doesn’t matter how it happens. It doesn’t matter if there were signs or if there weren’t signs,” Goodwin said. “It’s just, you know, losing a child is as bad as every parent thinks that it would be.”

In the U.S., the rate of young people dying by suicide increased nearly 60% between 2007 and 2018. Researchers say trends are especially alarming among Black youth.

In Goodwin’s home state of Colorado, suicide is the No. 1 cause of death for kids and young adults.

COVID-19 turned life upside down. Teens — already under the usual adolescent pressures of life, school, social media— are now dealing with a year-and-a-half of chronic pandemic stress.

“I’ve never seen anything like this,” Children’s Hospital Colorado Clinical Child Psychologist Jenna Glover said. “I’ve never seen this number of children who need help in mental health services. And I’ve never seen this many kids be in acute crisis.”

It’s gotten so bad that in 2021, for the first time in its 117-year history, Children’s Hospital Colorado declared a “state of emergency” for youth mental health.

“We’re seeing lots of kids come in with depression and anxiety, really nervous about starting the school year,” Glover continued. “So, real sense of hopelessness and not knowing how to solve their problems other than, ‘I just got to get out of this.'”

Experts say the reasons behind the nationwide jump in teen suicide over the last decade are varied and hard to pin down. Social media, money or family problems, even fear of school shootings and worry about climate change can all add up.

Making it worse, says Glover, is a shortage of professional help.

“There are not enough mental health services,” she said. “Catching kids early on — screening them in pediatrician offices, screening them at school and when they have just the beginnings of symptoms, getting them into preventative programs, and doing immediate intervention, so they don’t show up at the emergency department — we just need more of that.”

Short of professional help, experts say one of the most effective ways to prevent suicide is to talk about it.

“It is the most common myth that asking about suicide will increase it,” Glover said. “What we know is asking about suicide will absolutely decrease the risk of it and it keeps your kids safe.”

If teens are reluctant to talk to adults, the hope is they’ll talk to other teens.

Marin McKinney is a teen ambassador for a suicide prevention group called Robbie’s Hope, giving advice to other kids and adults, too.

“It’s OK to not be OK,” Marin said. “And a lot of us … we do go through bad days and tough situations. But there’s always someone out there who wants to listen and talk to you. … I would tell a parent to not overreact or overcomplicate the situation.”

Kari Eckert and her husband started Robbie’s Hope after losing their son in 2018.

Their home in Golden, Colorado, is now headquarters for an all-out effort to get kids and adults help to prevent suicide. They do everything from producing free guides on how to talk about it to lobbying state lawmakers for new laws. Several states, including Colorado, now allow teens to miss school to take a mental health day.

“Just really really good tips and it’s written by teens. … Kids bring this to the table and say, ‘It’s important to me. I shouldn’t have to lie about why I can’t be in school today,'” Eckert said. “We aren’t just about saying that teen suicide is a problem. We want to bring resources to this … We want to reduce teen suicide rates by 50% by 2028. That’s a big goal.”

For now, Goodwin is taking things day by day, hoping that being open about her tragedy helps other parents to not feel so alone.

“I guess focusing on something positive, focusing on the gift that we have — the gift that we had — with him makes the hard days a lot easier,” she said. “Secrets are toxic. And we felt that the only way that we could make losing a child worse is by passing that burden on to our other children, and being open and choosing to talk about it has been, I think, good for all of us. We just want to help one family.”

Source: newsy.com

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How Disability Misunderstandings And Stigma Impact Mental Well-Being

Disability experts say it’s common for doctors to misunderstand bodily autonomy, which can impact a person’s mental health.

CDC data shows about 26% of Americans live with a disability, whether it’s physical or mental.

Conditions like anxiety, spinal injury, ADHD, amputation, depression, cerebral palsy — these are just some examples.

Advocates say there’s a lot of misunderstanding about a person who has a disability. And that stigma not only runs deep — it can also have a huge impact on that individual’s mental health.

Twenty-eight-year-old New Yorker Chloé Valentine Toscano knows beauty, from walking in fashion week to her Instagram reels to publishing in magazines like Allure.

“I’m a writer. I’m someone who likes the color pink. I like butterflies. I like learning a lot about anyone and anything,” she said. “I think we all have differences, and I want to understand differences. … For me, beauty is just being open-minded,” she said.

She also has fought face-to-face with ugly mental health struggles caused by doctors who didn’t understand disability.

“It is a journey,” Valentine Toscano said.

She lost motor function from her elbow down in 2014. She adapted and spent years living with — as she calls it — dead weight. She got into paralypmic swimming and started her career.

Then, after years of researching and soul searching, she chose to amputate her arm.

“I know amputation can be very traumatic because some people, a lot of people,will experience it through trauma,” she said. “But that wasn’t where I was in my case. So, it wasn’t traumatic talking about it, but it was traumatic playing a game with the yeses and the nos.”

Valentine Toscano spent three years fighting to get her procedure. She says some surgeons told her any elective amputation was too risky, even though she was healthy. Other rejections came after her surgery had been approved and scheduled.

“The answer I got from one, he said, ‘Well, some people just need to learn to live with what they’ve got.’ That made me feel like someone else who wasn’t in my body was telling me what was better for me,” she said. “It felt very frustrating to have it and very offensive to have someone say that.”

Bodily autonomy — or the right to control what happens to your body — is a common struggle in the disability community. And disability experts say misunderstanding that is common, and can cause undue stress as well as impact a person’s mental well-being.

In Valentine Toscano’s story, it happened a few times.

She recounted that in one appointment: “I cried, I broke down and I felt like the minute I expressed that emotion, he sent me in for a psych evaluation, which felt like I was being punished for expressing emotion.” And then she described the examination, saying: “She was asking me, she said, ‘Do you find that you’re unattractive because of your arm and that you would be more attractive without it?’ And I was like, ‘It’s not about that at all. It’s never been about that.’ … I felt angry and belittled and just, not heard, because I was asking for one thing and being evaluated for something that wasn’t even remotely there.”

Clinical Psychologist Dr. Linda Mona has spent the past two decades working on disability and how it relates to health care.

“If you haven’t been exposed to it personally — you have not been exposed to it through being a family friend, a lover, whoever that might be — And you’re not called to do it professionally and you don’t see it around you, you don’t think about it.”

She says, unfortunately, Valentine Toscano’s experience is all too common. Mental health experts with lived experience or expertise in disability are rare.

“It can be quite challenging to find somebody,” Mona said. “The other thing to think about is the steps that come before that, which is that it’s very hard for people to access education if they have disability, let alone graduate school. And internship and fellowship…”

Sixty-one million U.S. adults, which is about one in 4, have some type of disability, according to the CDC.

A 2021 anonymous survey of graduating medical students showed 7.6% identified as having a disability. But data collected directly from medical schools show that only about 4% of medical students disclosed their disability.

That stigma against disability —physical or mental — runs deep.

From 1867 to 1974 U.S. cities had laws governing who could be in public. Codes included fining or jailing those deemed “diseased, maimed, mutilated, or anyway deformed.”

Mona says it’s federal bias favoring able-bodied people.

“You’re best at home. You’re best tucked away. Or, you’re best institutionalized out of the way of anybody else who is displeased with the way that you look,” she said.

She adds structural stigmas fueled misconceptions about disabled people’s decision-making about their own bodies.

NEWSY’S LINDSEY THEIS: When we talk about bodily autonomy, what type of impact cannot have long term on someone’s mental well-being?

LINDA MONA: Trying to bring that in and make your choices can have a huge effect on your mental health in the long run. … It also happens a lot with pregnancy and people with disabilities. Right? So, you know, somebody has some kind of cognitive mental difference or physical difference. There’s, you know, constant questioning about, you know, ‘you want to be pregnant? You know what that’s going to do to your body?’ … I don’t think anybody thinks those types of decisions are a simple decision. They’re complex. But you have to trust that somebody has made that made that decision with that context in mind and not assume that they’re uninformed.

In summer 2021, Valentine Toscano had her amputation surgery. She calls it a dream come true.

“I just felt happy,” she said. “I was like, ‘Oh my gosh.’ I got this is like a huge step in my life. It just felt like one of those, like, huge dreams. I got there. I got a huge part of my personality back immediately.”

Valentine Toscano uses a prosthetic, as needed. It’s bright pink and purple with a lot of glitter.

“If I could have decided to have been born with an arm with butterflies and sparkles on it, like right out of the womb, I would have picked that,” she said.

Valentine Toscano said her prosthetic cost $13,000.

“It’s something that’s very expensive,” she said. “I was fortunate to have it covered by health insurance. But that’s not something everyone has.”

Valentine Toscano continues to advocate and write, sharing her experience now from two different sides of disability. She’s also writing a book on the side.

She says the ability to share those stories in her voice and having others listen is not only good for her well-being, it’s truly beautiful.

Source: newsy.com

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Advocates, Patients Push For Mental Health Resources In Mississippi

The state is trying to figure out how to provide mental health patients with more community-based options.

Melody Worsham is a mother, teacher and volunteer who says she’s fought a 30-year battle with a disease that mental health professionals were supposed to help her with but instead left her feeling humiliated.

“I live with PTSD, with psychotic features. And as soon as someone hears the word ‘psychotic,’ they think I am that person that’s in some sneaky little dark closet and I’m doing some sneaky little back-channel thing on social media, and I’m about to pull out an AR-15 and get on the rooftop somewhere,” she said. “I don’t have a dangerous bone in my body … It angers me so bad because it puts a barrier up to people asking for help because it’s that automatic.”

Worsham penned an open letter to the state’s attorney general pointing to a 2016 Department of Justice lawsuit against the state of Mississippi for unnecessarily institutionalizing adults and children with mental health disabilities.

A federal judge agreed there should be more community-based options.

The National Alliance on Mental Illness in Mississippi says even the state’s big institutions weren’t providing the help people needed.

Sitaniel Wimbley is the executive director of NAMI Mississippi.

“Prime example: A lot of the facilities are in bigger cities in the state. So, if you live in a rural area, you have to manage getting to the facility,” she said. “Once you get there, you have to make sure you have an appointment. If you have an appointment, there has to be insurance. So, there’s a lot of things that go into actually getting treatment.”

Now in 2022, the Magnolia State — known for catfish, cotton and Southern charm — is still trying to figure out how to provide patients with the necessary care closer to home.

The good news is changes are on the horizon. For starters, the state is taking full advantage of the new National Suicide and Crisis Lifeline.

“When someone calls 988, they will be either sent to an officer who has to come out — and their person should be trained to help with mental health — or a clinician can come out to that person’s home to try to do an assessment,” Wimbley said. “So, things like that are making a difference.”

Another area program making strides is NAMI’s Peer-to-Peer Program. Jessica James is one of the peers specialists in recovery who’s helping others.

“We have people who live with the mental illness that are in recovery, that are able to help others in their recovery,” she said.

James is a longtime Mississippi resident who is proud of her accomplishments. She achieved her associate degree with honors, raised two successful kids and has been a peer support specialist with NAMI for eight years.

For James, it was a long path to get to where she is today.

“I really didn’t know what was going on with me until it was 2014,” she said.

James says she suffers from anxiety, depression.

“I also was told that I may have a little PTSD as well,” she continued.

James recalls one tough day on a job she loved. She’d been missing work but couldn’t muster the strength to get out of bed.

“I would have a boost of energy at times,” she said. “But then, all of a sudden, it just seemed like my whole world just went and crashed down.”

A supervisor called her in an after seeing her doctor’s note

James says the supervisor dialed the number to make sure the note was real. It was devastating for her.

“I’m seeing her do this in front of me … I felt like I’m being punished for me being sick and like she didn’t care,” she said.

That hopeless feeling didn’t last long, though. She remembered seeing the NAMI promotion table at a health fair she went to with her son. That led to a partnership between the two.

As a peer, James now helps others push through the mental health issues she faced.

Worsham is also a peer support specialist. Newsy caught up with her during work at the Mental Health Association of South Mississippi.

“This isn’t about looking at a disease,” she said. “It’s not what’s wrong with you, it’s what’s strong with you. That’s our focus with our people.”

She says the program isn’t what you would call “clinical.” It’s actually unique because there are no psychiatrists or licensed therapists involved, and it’s voluntary.

“There’s no one-size-fits-all model. And that’s something that those of us with lived experience, we do understand,” Worsham said. “We are about sitting down and exploring that with you and finding out what your pathway is and what’s going to work. And it might be a Franken-program, you know, you do a little 12-step thing here, or you might have some spiritual thing going on, and then you need a drop-in, you know, meditation.”

A 2019 report by Mental Health America says peer support specialists lower the cost of mental health services and help reduce the rate of hospital recidivism.

The National Institute for Health Research also found people receiving peer support lowered the risk of being hospitalized by 14% and significantly increased recovery.

“The state of Mississippi is now starting to focus on it a little bit more and make sure that peer specialists are in every county,” Wimbley said. “I think last year, there were 164 trained to be peer specialists across the state. And then some of those, I want to say between 10 and 12, were actually in jail systems. So, they can now lead others through their mental health journey and say, ‘It’s OK not to be OK.”

As the Magnolia State tries to grow its mental health programs to satisfy the Department of Justice, mental health advocates are helping to cultivate the Peer-to-Peer program to provide help to those in need.

Source: newsy.com

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California Woman Gets 18 Months For Kidnapping Hoax

As part of the plea agreement, she has agreed to reimburse law enforcement agencies for the costs of the search for her and her nonexistent kidnapper.

A Northern California mother of two was sentenced Monday to 18 months in prison for faking her own kidnapping so she could go back to a former boyfriend, which led to a three-week, multi-state search before she resurfaced on Thanksgiving Day in 2016.

Sherri Papini, 40, pleaded guilty last spring under a plea bargain that requires her to pay more than $300,000 in restitution.

Probation officers and Papini’s attorney had recommended that she spend a month in custody and seven months in supervised home detention. But Senior U.S. District Judge William Shubb said he opted for an 18-month sentence in order to deter others.

The judge said he considered the seriousness of the offense and “the sheer number of people who were impacted.”

Papini, who was emotional throughout the proceedings, quietly answered, “Yes, sir,” when the judge asked if she understood the sentence. Previously she was in tears as she gave a statement to the court accepting responsibility and admitting her guilt.

“As painful as it is,” Papini accepts her sentence as part of her recovery, defense attorney William Portanova said after the hearing.

Portanova previously said Papini was troubled and disgraced and that she should serve most of her sentence at home. Prosecutors, though, said it was imperative that she spend her full term in prison. The judge ordered her to report to prison Nov. 8.

“Papini’s kidnapping hoax was deliberate, well planned, and sophisticated,” prosecutors wrote in their court filing. And she was still falsely telling people she was kidnapped months after she pleaded guilty in April to staging the abduction and lying to the FBI about it, they wrote.

“The nation is watching the outcome of Papini’s sentencing hearing,” Assistant U.S. Attorneys Veronica Alegria and Shelley Weger wrote. “The public needs to know that there will be more than a slap on the wrist for committing financial fraud and making false statements to law enforcement, particularly when those false statements result in the expenditure of substantial resources and implicate innocent people.”

“Outwardly sweet and loving, yet capable of intense deceit … Ms. Papini’s chameleonic personalities drove her to simultaneously crave family security and the freedom of youth,” Portanova wrote in his responding court filing.

So “in pursuit of a non-sensical fantasy,” Portanova said the married mother fled to a former boyfriend in Southern California, nearly 600 miles south of her home in Redding. He dropped her off along Interstate 5 about 150 miles from her home after she said she wanted to go home.

Passersby found her with bindings on her body, a swollen nose, a blurred “brand” on her right shoulder, bruises and rashes across her body, ligature marks on her wrists and ankles, and burns on her left forearm. All of the injuries were self-inflicted and were designed to substantiate her story that she had been abducted at gunpoint by two Hispanic women while she was out for a run.

The wounds were a manifestation of her “unsettled masochism” and “self-inflicted penance,” Portanova wrote. And once she began, “each lie demanded another lie.”

Prosecutors said Papini’s ruse harmed more than just herself and her family. “An entire community believed the hoax and lived in fear that Hispanic women were roving the streets to abduct and sell women,” they wrote.

Prosecutors agreed to seek a sentence on the low end of the sentencing range in exchange for Papini’s guilty plea. That was projected to be between eight and 14 months in custody, down from the maximum 25 years for the two charges.

She has offered no rationale for her actions, which stumped even independent mental health experts who said her actions didn’t conform with any typical diagnosis.

“Papini’s painful early years twisted and froze her in myriad ways,” Portanova said in arguing for home confinement. With her deception finally revealed, he said, “It is hard to imagine a more brutal public revelation of a person’s broken inner self. At this point, the punishment is already intense and feels like a life sentence.”

But prosecutors said her “past trauma and mental health issues alone cannot account for all of her actions.”

“Papini’s planning of her hoax kidnapping was meticulous and began months in advance — it was not merely the reaction to a traumatic childhood,” they wrote.

After herarrestin March, Papini received more than $30,000 worth of psychiatric care for anxiety, depression and post-traumatic stress disorder. She billed the state’s victim compensation fund for the treatment, and now must pay it back as part of her restitution.

As part of the plea agreement, she has agreed to reimburse law enforcement agencies more than $150,000 for the costs of the search for her and her nonexistent kidnappers, and repay the $128,000 she received in disability payments since her return.

Additional reporting by The Associated Press.

Source: newsy.com

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Swedish Program Aims To Fight High Youth Suicide Rate In Montana

In Montana, the youth suicide rate between 2011 and 2020 was more than double the national rate for the same age group.

Montana is known for its wide open spaces, craggy mountains and fresh, clear water.

But for all its beauty, it’s also known for a devastating epidemic.

The youth suicide rate in Montana between 2011 and 2020 was more than double the national rate for the same age group.

The reasons behind the statistic are a complicated, cultural issue. A March 2022 report released by the state cites vitamin D deficiencies, altitude, social isolation and access to firearms as just a few of the reasons. It also shows 1 in 5 Montana kids live more than 100% below the federal poverty line. And the state has a high concentration of American Indians, who experience higher rates of suicide.

Kelley Edwards is the program director for Youth Aware of Mental Health (YAM) at Montana State University’s Center for Mental Health Research and Recovery. She knows firsthand what teen suicide can do to a community.

“I lived it. My co-workers lived it. My students lived it,” she said.

Edwards used to teach high school in Helena, Montana, where seven students in her school died by suicide in a three-year span.

“It will never leave me what that was like,” Edwards said.

Helena High School administrators knew something needed to happen, and they found the solution in Sweden, which is home to Youth Aware of Mental Health.

“Helena School District was instrumental in bringing YAM to the United States, because they recognized the seriousness of the problem and wanted to do something about it,” Edwards said.

YAM started in 2014 with the goal of bringing down teen suicide rates.

A randomly-controlled trial with 11,000 participants showed it reduced suicide ideation and attempts by about 50%. New cases of depression fell by about 30% in kids participating.

The program is in 16 countries and its trainers are traveling the world to expand even more.

Edwards is a program manager and also teaches it.

“I’ve had kids say right after a session either, ‘I’m really, really depressed,’ or possibly, even, they’ve said, ‘I’m suicidal.’ And they are. They’ve said, ‘I’m really, really worried about a friend,'” Edwards shared.

Designed for kids between 13 and 18 years old, the program consists of five five-hour sessions over three weeks, which dive into mental health literacy, role playing and identifying stressors and resources.

“We need to get to the point where our students are comfortable with mental health knowledge, and what to do when your normal coping skills are not working or where it gets too severe that you would need professional help,” Edwards said.

But as Edwards knows, that’s not easy in rural places, like her native Montana — especially now.

“I grew up in Denton, Montana. For students in rural areas that may not have access to anything … The best that we can provide at this point is starting with just having someone to talk to,” Edwards said. “It’s not ideal by any means. But that is where we’re at, unfortunately.”

Mary Windecker runs the advocacy group Behavioral Health Alliance of Montana. She, and so many other mental health professionals, are taking their concerns to state and federal leaders. They’re trying to get more attention and funding on this issue.

“Overall in the United States, we’re failing our children. That’s true by every metric you could possibly measure,” Windecker said.

And beyond Montana, people in the field of mental health are working to do what they can to help the next generation before it’s too late.

Source: newsy.com

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