Month: April 2017

Leftist Radicalism Ignores Free Speech As Readily as Right Wing Does

~ Frank ~ Leave a comment

In this morning’s Education section of the Washington Post, an article appeared, “Ann Coulter a no-show at raucous but peaceful Berkeley rally,” which gave me a very sad case of Yogi Berra’s famous saying to the effect that ‘It’s deju vue all over again.”

Over the last few weeks, there has been a shameful display of political intolerance, ignoring of the fundamental right of free speech that this country tries to maintain, sustain, uphold and protect for the good all. But it has been roundly trashed in Berkeley CA on the campus of UC Berkely the few weeks. The controversial right-wing political commentator Ann Coulter who has become I suppose in the last several years the left wing-nuts vision of Joe McCarthy, Rasputin and The Wicked Witch of the West for that Far Left. Ignore that she is in her own right, very bright and in my opinion DOES speak for a very sizeable segment of the American populace unhappy with the decline of the middle class, wage freeze, resentment of the growing power of the Federal Government etc. She has useful things to say and a number of them need attention and to be welcomed into the world of political discourse in this country. They do represent a “sizeable portion” of our citizenry’s heartfelt ideas.

I am a centrist which means I catch it sometimes from all sides it seems. Personally I find Ann Coulter astonishingly fascist in some of her remarks but I have to give her credit for raising issues that the liberal elites in this country ignore, pooh-pooh as beneath them or as the by product of inferior minds or the less educated. And therein lies the dead giveaway that those who denigrate Ms. Coulter, who dismiss her observations and points out of hand, are just as prejudiced and “fascist” as those they label as such.

I am personally glad to hear that the ACLU whom some quarters loathe and still see as the fount of communism, radicalism, or some other evil “ism,” is coming to Ms. Coulter’s defense. Ms. Coulter was not only extremely shabbily treated by Berkeley but her freedom of speech was trampled on just as if she had been stampeded over by a herd of my maternal grandfather’s vast cowherds of New Mexico of the 1930’s.

I went to college in one of the hotbeds of student left wing radicalism of decades ago and remember the exact same issue transpiring. A very conservative well-known figure’s announced appearance at an upcoming educational colloquium at the university was reviled days and weeks ahead of time and would have cancel or be subjected to embarrassingly shameful treatment, being interrupted by horrendous offensive heckling to the extent they could not speak and so on. I feel cheated as I was a big naive student sponge back then and wanted to hear what everybody had to say unfettered so that I could digest their ideas, mull them over and decide what I thought was legitimate and useful no matter what end of the political spectrum it came from. I saw the exact same kinds of brutish, intolerant, shouting down of reasonable advocated for the exchange of ideas played out semester after semester. I came to conclude that the wing-nuts from bosideside of the political  spectrum were more similar, more “fascist,” equally intolerant, and equally dangerous to rational reasonable discourse and debate as whatever dictator was in power and in power in some other part of the world back them. And if I voiced my sentiments as I did a few times at student colloquia when I was an upperclassman and more sure of myself on a stage with a microphone in my hand, I was shouted down until I had to give up and leave the stage.

I foresee right wing backlash this time as being more likely than it was 40 years ago when I was a student. Fortunately back then the local state legislative leaders looked upon those “student antics,” as not so dangerous and were peacefully paternalistic about it all with some sort of “students will be students,” mantra and trusting that most of them would “grow out of it.”

Not now. I fear that after decades of this kind of dumb behavior, right-leaning legislators are going to realize that they have legislative power over their state-funded universities and could easily come to the ideas of retaliatory financial punishments as consequences. The older generation in power could easily economical severely spank the upstart pesky intolerant students. Loyalty oaths for faculty efforts could follow. And we would be off to the races of more polarization which would no do any good at all and only “harden their hearts,” on both sides, and make their “necks stiff”-er than ever. And there would go trying to find common ground and be moving toward the unifying middle and the needed art of tolerance of another’s differing point of view, so necessary for a democracy such as ours has been for so long out the window sucking all dieas out into the void of dead intellectual “space,” which would be a great loss for all of us.

 

Fentanyl Overdose Deaths Surge in North Carolina in 2016

~ Frank ~ Leave a comment

On April 19th, an article detailing the growing scourge of fentanyl-induced deaths appeared in one of my favorite health reporting publication in North Carolina, the North Carolina Health News a factual, objective “just the facts” type publication. The article,”Report: Fentanyl Overdoses Jumped in 2016,” was sobering reading indeed. The author was , an established and very experienced health affairs reporter who is also an RN.

It documented the extremely rapidly increasing rate and number of fentanyl related overdose deaths in NC with data from the North Carolina State Medical Examiner’s office in Chapel Hill based at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

To illustrate: The following factoid shows the dramatic escalation highlighted in this article: 2 deaths in 2013, 28 in 2014, 71 in 2015, and then 156 in 2016!

As Ms. Hoban very accurately wrote fentanyl is incredibly more potent that ‘your average narcotic,’ in that it is “as much as 100 times stronger than morphine.” Further in her article what I consider one of the more malignant aspects of this epidemic. That circumstance is that once again like unto the LSD age of the late 1960’s and the early 1970’s, the “chemists” are coming out of the woodwork and generation analogues, biochemical close cousins of the fentanyl faster than legislatures can identify, classify and outlaw them.

Amd it is now well known that most of the sources of the “fentanyls” as one almost has to speak of them in the plural, are coming from outside the country, much of the on the street supply coming from Mexico. Economic incentive to manufacture, smuggle in, cut and distribute and then finally sell on the street is massive motivating. While a kilo of heroin is worth at least a thousand dollars on the street, a kilo of fentanyl is worth a million dollars!

So it was almost tragically predictably that fentanyl related deahts would drastically increase in NC as it has in the “Big Cities,” the figures are still startling.to refer to the article once again, “According to a report released this month by the North Carolina Department of Health and Human Services, overdose deaths related to fentanyl increased by 93 percent in 2016.”
The following factoid shows the dramatic escalation highlighted in this article: 2 deaths in 2013, 28 in 2014, 71 in 2015, and then 156 in 2016!

One of the subtle but constant and ‘reliable’ characteristics of fentanyl is that it is rapid acting, fast in its time from ingestion to onset of effect. Simply put, this means that this drug gives the ingestee very little time to signal for help if they detect that the dose they have guesstimated for themselves is too large, they have almost no time to get life saving treatment.

Several years ago, the NC Medical Society did a brave thing and started providing free, no questions asked, EpiPen-injectors of naloxone, the narcotic antagonist or “reverser” drug. One county that had a rising and alarming amount of opiate related deaths was selected. The injector pens were given to families with opiate addicts in clinics, medical offices in a nonjudgmental manner in that no law enforcement figures were called, no recipients were arrested. It became clear over time that the program was saving lives in unprecedented numbers.Use of opiate-reversal drug naloxone has become more accepted over the past decade as law enforcement agencies, social service agencies and even the state health director have promoted its use as a harm reduction agent nationwide now.

As the authors of this article pithily phrased the lesson learned: “Dead people can’t find recovery,” demonstrating the all too obvious circumstance that if a drug abuser is save from death, recover can start and have a change of turning a life around.

Still use of naloxone to give to an unresponsive fentanyl often requires many times the doses of the same drug naloxone when dealing with a heroin overdose. Counties in many many locales are finding that their budgets are ballooning almost out of control posing another perhaps partially unforeseen problems.

The Problem of the Treatment Resistant Chronically Mentally Ill

~ Frank ~ Leave a comment

I have hit a dry spell recently as far as ideas/inspirations for this more personal, less professional blog. One interfering and mind clogging constant information bombardment of no help has been the daily national political uproar on “both sides of the aisle” that has been, in the current kindest of descriptors: “distracting.”

I have made a personal pledge to myself to try to avoid as much as possible political topics and I am not a political observer or analyst of any value and politics is almost indecipherable to me, as I try to understand the deal making and constant shifting alliances. The poliltical method of functioning is inimical to me and I am just not emotionall built for the world of endeavor.

But lately I have seen remarks in the press and national discourse, much of which are from state leaders and budgeteers trying to cut more monies out of mental health services for the most severely ill who need some of the most help to ensure social functioning on at least a minimally uneventful level.

The remarks I have read have still been based on the persisting and most naive of mistaken attitudes toward the “PSMI,” or persistently severely mentally ill as these patients are sometimes given their own acronym.

It has debatably been obvious that in the last 20-30 years we have mistakenly over-reduced the number of needed inpatient psychiatric acute hospital based by at least 50-75%. Decades ago we had reportedly around 550,000inpatient beds in this country before the advent of effective treatments, psychiatric drugs, many news kinds of group and individual psychotherapies well beyond the limited confines and reaches of traditional psychoanalysis. as well as the first effective psychiatric treatment at least for very severe depressions, ECT, reviled and controversial as it has been.

With the growing advent of new psychiatric treatments especially the near avalanche of new psychotropics, it became possible to discharge inpatients from years of past near incarcerations in hospitals of all genres, and the rapid expansion of outpatient psychological mental health services and methods was on, like the Oklahoma land rush.

The “de-institutionalization” ethos and ideological movement took hold just many other dominant schools of thought had done so (and have continued to do so in the last 50 decades that have also proven to be of short sighted or harmful worth such as “est,” “birthing therapy,” and the many other fads that mental health treatment is no more immune to than any other of human endeavor. The deinstitutionalisation movement held that being hospitalized for long periods of time, especially if harsh methods of frank abuse were utilized, were dehumanizing, severely destructive to the personality and emotional functioning of chronic inpatients. I have no argument with this aspect of this ideological movement as I am old enough to have seen almost unspeakable abuse in hospitals I visited and helped to review often because of scandals and tragedies.

But it had its unforeseen consequences, accelerated by the economic downtown in this country beginning in the Midwest Rustbelt manufacturing states in the 1990’s, then the several other unbelievably costly recessions we have repeatedly experienced as the result of the dark side of our free market’s system’s “dark side,” the institutional greed on a national scale that resulted in the western states’ Savings and Loan Scandal dreamed up  by Charles Keating, the “dot com bust,” the Enron scandal, and then finally the even larger nationwide housing mortgage scandal bubble that lingers with us yet.

States’ revenues did not just decrease, they decreased in the spans of several to a few years like submarines diving to the bottom to avoid depth charges. As a result state coffers shrank to levels not seen since the Great Depression. All kinds of larger and human social services with cut drastically within relatively short periods of time.

This is an old and known “truism” of the ‘mental health crisis’ in this country. What is less appreciated in my view, is that the majority of the historical numerical peak of beds in the ‘old days’ before the advent of modern psychiatric treatment, (which is what made deinstitutionalization and liberation of so many chronically ill patients possible), are now demonstrating that they need still all encompassing humane “institutions” to take care of their complex needs whether it be medical management, speech therapy, social skills building that takes long periods of time for many patients, and a host of other needs including top flight, organized readily available and accessible medical care. This is because the chronically mentally ill have been shown to have far more medical care needs than the average citizen; there are many reasons for this but that is a topic for another occasion.

The takeaway point of this post that I have been working toward is to subtly some of the deinstitutionzation over statements in the long standing set of beliefs about why so many PSMI patients ended up in large psychiatric institutions.

One of the most insoluble reasons that is with us today in even greater numbers (which why we have those unfortunately flooding the homeless enclaves of the streets in cities, the jails at all levels in this country and every ER in the country is the phenomon of the treatment refractory or more simply and in less technical psychiatric-speak, the treatment resistant patient.

Let me offer some backdrop here. Only 60% or less of persons with severe chronic or relapsing depression respond well or “fully” or in my way of looking at treatment results, satisfactorily to the old or the new expensive Prozac era antidepressants.

In the arena of recurring psychosis, which almost all psychotic illness is chronic and relapsing. A very high percentage of the psychotic patients never are completely rid of a substantial portion of their severe and difference producing symptoms and behaviors.

Only with the exception toxic, drug induced psychosis, or that induced as an unpleasant byproduct of a serious but treatable and therefore temporary medical illness, rendering the psychosis similarly short lived.

Epidemiological and long term result studies have shown consistently for generations that somewhere close to half of psychotic patients respond very well to old or new antipsychotics. Many, perhaps more than a majority are left with the symptoms of what used to be called, “chronic” or “undifferentiated” schizophrenia. Nowadays we call their very disabling residual symptoms, the negative or cognitive symptoms. They largely do not respond to anything and worsen inexorably as the patient ages. They become more and more passive socially, asocial (not antisocial, they just socialize, converse and relate in ordinary give and take talking of everyday relationship ‘commerce,’ less and less and less). Their emotional spontaneity, expressivity, ordinary use of facial expressions in conversations decreases to almost nil and is called the “flat affect,” of schizophrenia. They seem lose vocabulary though not in a manner similar to the dementias, they just use far fewer words in conversations’ their range of topics of conversations shrink with time. They usually became more and more socially isolative and isolated. For all these reasons, they are not all violent as so often portrayed in the ill-informed media. This is why they commit far fewer crimes than is attributed to them and why they are far more likely than the average person to be the victims of crimes.

All these treatment resistant factors make them poorly functional in even the most gentle and non-demanding of social settings. And this is why they still need “institutions,” of whatever size. They are almost akin to younger nursing home patients, except they can walk and talk but are also in a world of their own, yet very different.

And there are more than twice as many of them as the years before the advent of modern psychiatric treatment. And until we have true breakthroughs in the treatment of the psychiatric psychoses, that stop and reverse the neurodegenerative “secondary” symptoms of schizophrenia, that likely are still decades distant, we will need to provide for these persons far better than we do now and that means housing and care centers, in other words, modern institutions.