Tuesday, May 22, 2007

The implications of 'screw you' as official policy

You know, I was just thinking that the precursor to nihilistic political violence -- a.k.a., jihad -- was an ongoing sociopolitical hopelessness in the Muslim, particularly Arab, world.

And you could argue that the mindset of violent Islamofascism is, in some way, objectively insane. Ingrained, institutionalized, societal insanity.

Which kind of makes the official neglect of a destroyed American city -- and the further official neglect of the despair the original neglect has bred -- every bit as nuts, doesn't it?

From New Orleans City Business:

In nine years in adult psychiatry, Stephen Menendez has never before seen a population of young psychotics resistant to all forms of anti-psychotic medication.

“We’re seeing a lot of people between the ages of 20 and 30 coming in with their first psychotic breakdown,” said Menendez, supervisor of adult psychiatry at East Jefferson General Hospital. “They’re hearing, seeing and sensing things that aren’t there. They’re paranoid and delusional and they aren’t responding to anti-psychotic medications, and we don’t know why. It seems like a new phenomenon.”

More than 20 months after Hurricane Katrina, mental health professionals say the severity of mental illness in New Orleans has reached new lows and is deteriorating.

More patients are exhibiting post-traumatic stress disorder symptoms while mental health services are nearly impossible to find, said Celeste Lewis, a staff nurse at River Oaks Hospital.

The number of adult inpatient psychiatric beds nosedived 93 percent to 17 from a pre-storm high of 234.

“It’s just a feeling of hopelessness, overwhelming sadness and that life is not going to get better any time soon,” said Lewis. “That spirit of determination that ‘we’re going to get through this and rebuild’ has really faded. It’s made people feel apathetic about their general health. The city is really suffering.”

Mayor C. Ray Nagin recently wrote to Gov. Kathleen Babineaux Blanco demanding the state address the emergency mental health needs of New Orleans. The city lost nearly 100 psychiatric beds and a 40-bed crisis intervention unit after Charity Hospital closed following Hurricane Katrina.

Louisiana State University spokesman Marvin McGraw said the hospital division plans to establish 33 psychiatric beds at its DePaul campus in New Orleans before the end of the year. But there are no plans to recreate a crisis intervention unit.

The New Orleans Adolescent Hospital added 20 psychiatric beds but did little to solve the problem, said Alice Craft-Kerney, executive director of the Lower Ninth Ward Health Clinic, where 95 percent of patients exhibit post-traumatic stress disorder symptoms.

Mentally ill patients in New Orleans are either forced to wait for hours in emergency rooms ill-equipped to handle their needs, sent to hospitals in Mississippi or northern Louisiana if a bed becomes available — or they are medicated and released.

“If that happens, the best case you go to jail, the worst you get killed,” said Craft-Kerney.
FOR MORE INFO: Medical News Today

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