mental health 
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SOURCE: Made By History at the Washington Post
3/13/2023
Eric Adams's Involuntary Commitment Plan for Mentally Ill has a Long, Cruel History (and Won't Help)
by Jeremy Peschard
The history of involuntary hospitalization is one of the removal of the most marginalized and vulnerable people from society, in increasingly cruel and inhumane conditions, with treatment and reintegration to society an afterthought. It's unclear the New York mayor's plans will be different.
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SOURCE: Made By History at the Washington Post
2/21/2023
Does Sen. Fetterman's Depression Disclosure Signal Change in Mental Health Acceptance?
by Jonathan Sadowsky
51 years ago the Democratic vice presidential candidate, Senator Thomas Eagleton, was dropped from the ticket when it was revealed he had received treatment for depression. A historian of mental health says it's too simple to declare progress without acknowledging ongoing stigma.
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SOURCE: Made By History at the Washington Post
1/3/2022
NY Mayor's Proposal to Lock Up Mentally Ill Has Long History
by Elliott Young
The impulse to heal the mentally ill has long battled the impulse to lock them up as a threat to the society. Eric Adams is trying to do the latter while claiming to do the former.
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SOURCE: CNN
12/7/2022
Beyond Yale and Stanford, Colleges are Dropping the Ball on Student Mental Health
by David M. Perry
If two high profile incidents are any indication, many colleges seek to move students with mental health concerns off campus as quickly and quietly as possible, putting their own liability and reputation ahead of the needs of students for supportive community.
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SOURCE: Hartford Courant
6/3/2022
Professor Discusses the use of Asylum Scenes in "Stranger Things"
Troy Rondinone's expertise on cultural portrayals of mental health facilities connects with two key plotlines in the latest season of the Netflix horror series.
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SOURCE: Boston Review
5/17/2022
What if Mental Illness Isn't All In Your Head?
by Marco Ramos
A historian of mental health reviews two new books and concludes that pharmaceutical and neurological approaches to mental health have failed and it's time to turn the lens onto society.
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SOURCE: TomDispatch
8/3/2021
Moral Injury and the Forever Wars
by Kelly Denton-Borhaug
"Andy’s story clarifies a reality Americans badly need to grasp: the destruction of war goes far beyond its intended targets. In the end, its violence is impossible to control."
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SOURCE: Made By History at the Washington Post
7/27/2021
The U.S. has Never Tried a Comprehensive Approach to Mental Health Care
by Hannah Zeavin
"The United States has never redressed a massive shortage of mental health-care providers, and no unified national infrastructure is in place to assist the most vulnerable would-be patients with navigating the difficult process of finding competent care and paying for it."
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SOURCE: The New Republic
2/16/2021
Can Historians Be Traumatized by History? (Content Warning)
by James Robins
"If the historian—the very person supposed to process the past on behalf of everyone else—struggles with trauma, then it is little surprise that societies as a whole struggle to face the violence of how they were formed and how they prevailed."
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SOURCE: The Metropole
2/2/2021
African Americans At St. Elizabeth’s — A Review Of Madness In The City Of Magnificent Expectations
Martin Summers' book on Washington's Saint Elizabeth's Hospital shows how early mental health institutions differentiated the Black and White psyches in diagnosis and care, exposing the role of psychiatry in maintaining and institutionalizing racial inequality, writes reviewer Debra Kram-Fernandez.
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SOURCE: Psychiatry Advisor
5/29/2020
Confronting the History of a Southern Asylum: An Interview With Mab Segrest
Dr. Segrest's new book uncovers the harrowing story of the Georgia State Lunatic, Idiot, and Epileptic Asylum.
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SOURCE: CityLab
4/14/2020
How America Has Racialized Medicine During Epidemics
Mab Segrest explores the history of blaming black people for bad health outcomes in her new book, “Administrations of Lunacy: Racism and the Haunting of American Psychiatry at the Milledgeville Asylum.”
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SOURCE: AHA Perspectives
10/17/19
Career Diversity and the Crisis of Grad Student Mental Health
by Erin Leigh Inama, Sarah Stoller, and James Vernon
The myth of the academy as a meritocracy that rewards the smartest and most talented often generates anxiety and depression.
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SOURCE: Washington Post
5/20/19
We need to stop focusing on the mental health of mass shooters
by Deborah Doroshow
Mentally ill Americans are already stigmatized — and wrongly so.
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SOURCE: New Yorker
5/20/19
The Troubling History of Psychiatry
Challenges to the legitimacy of the profession have forced it to examine itself, including the fundamental question of what constitutes a mental disorder.
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SOURCE: Pacific Standard
2/5/19
How to Make Graduate School More Humane
by David M. Perry
There's a mental-health crisis among graduate students, and it bears particularly hard on those with disabilities. Fixing it requires specific mental-health supports—and broad cultural change.
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SOURCE: Christian Science Monitor
9-25-13
Stand Up to the Biggest Bully in the Room: Mental Illness
by Jonathan Zimmerman
Mental illness is the far more likely culprit than bullying in suicides and school shootings.
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How Depression Went Mainstream: Interview with Dr. Edward Shorter
by Robin Lindley
Psychiatrists are very interested in the historical perspectives because they can see the obvious power that an understanding of history brings to appreciating the current situation. Historians haven’t been so interested. Psychiatrists are centered on diagnosis and treatment, and those are the two aspects that are central to the practice of medicine.
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Is Colorado's Institution for the Homeless Willowbrook Redux?
by Alison Bateman-House
Colorado could benefit from a history lesson. With Governor John Hickenlooper having just repurposed Fort Lyon, a former Veterans’ Administration hospital most recently used as a prison, for a homeless rehabilitation program, Coloradans should recall the experience of the Willowbrook State School, the institution famously described by Senator Robert Kennedy as a “snake pit.” At first glance, there is not much in common between Fort Lyon and Willowbrook. In an effort to address homelessness, particularly among veterans, Fort Lyon will house up to three hundred chronically homeless individuals, providing them with vocational training and supportive services for substance abuse and mental illness. After at least one year of residency at Fort Lyon, participants will be eligible to receive a Section 8 housing voucher.
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The Tragedy of Involuntary Commitment
by Bruce Chadwick
Airswimming Irish Repertory Theatre 132 W. 22d Street New York, N.Y.Airswimming is a jolting shocker about two women incarcerated in a mental hospital in England for fifty years due to their eccentricity and because they violated British society’s rules of conduct during the 1920s. At the same time, Charlotte Jones’s 1997 play is an enduring, enchanting story of the strength of the human spirit and how two people’s friendship helped them survive a living hell.In 1922, Dora (played by Aedin Moloney) was tossed into St. Dymphnas Hospital for the Criminally Insane and followed there two years later by Persephone. They mark the first few years of their imprisonment, but so many years go by they lose count. The hospital has teamed them up to clean the bathrooms one hour each day, and that is the time we see them on stage. There, scrubbing down the bathtub, the pair realizes that they need each other to survive the Hades they occupy.
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