Schizophrenic. Killer. My Cousin.

Deinstitutionalization moved thousands of mentally ill people out of hospitals and into the prison system. States are cutting mental-health funding. A look at America’s mental health care crisis:

“‘Homelessmentallyilldeinstitutionalized was one noun in the media at the time,’ says SAMHSA’s Roth, who is the source of the oft-cited data point that a third of America’s homeless people are seriously mentally ill (helping to rebut the misconception then that they all were). In 1984, Dr. John A. Talbott, then president of the American Psychiatric Association, apologized for the association’s role in the disaster. ‘The psychiatrists involved in the policymaking at that time certainly oversold community treatment,’ he said, ‘and our credibility today is probably damaged because of it.’

“‘Think of it as haircuts,’ says Roth, who watched deinstitutionalization unfold in her 37 years as chief of evaluation and research at the Ohio Department of Mental Health. ‘In the age of the great gothic castle on the hill, mentally ill patients had everything taken care of. Health care, sleeping, eating, etc. When they got out, they were supposed to have everything. They got Medicare and Medicaid, but [policymakers] didn’t think about food. And haircuts. Clothes. How to find a place to live.’ How to do laundry; how to grocery shop. How to ensure people who need meds take them. What to do with people who had too many behavioral problems to avoid being evicted six times in a row.”

Source: Mother Jones
Published: Apr 29, 2013
Length: 33 minutes (8,317 words)

A Mother Jones Reading List: Fashion #Longreads

A collection of stories from Salon, Jane, The New Yorker, New York Times and more.

Source: Mother Jones
Published: Mar 30, 2013
Length: 3 minutes (996 words)

How Crazy Is Too Crazy to Be Executed?

A look at mental illness and the death penalty:

“The doctor would later testify that Andre was ‘really mentally ill,’ as if to stress that this wasn’t just your run-of-the-mill crazy person. And then there was this detail from the physician’s records: “Thomas,” he wrote, “is psychotic. He thinks something like Holodeck on Star Trek is happening to him.” If you don’t know what that is, and there is no good reason you should, a holodeck is a simulated reality facility—a place where nothing is real.

“Finally, the patient wanted to know whether he had volunteered for his life, or been forced to live it. Maybe that was the final straw. The doctor referred Andre to the hospital’s mental health unit and filled out an emergency detention order to hold him against his will. But while staffers waited for a judge to sign the order, Andre simply wandered off. The hospital called the police, but there’s no evidence that officers went looking for him at the home of Andre’s mother or any of his other relatives. The next time they saw him, he was walking into the Sherman police station to confess to killing his family.”

Source: Mother Jones
Published: Feb 12, 2013
Length: 24 minutes (6,080 words)

Is PTSD Contagious?

A look at the families who are not just affected by returning veterans, but display similar symptons:

“Brannan and Katie’s teacher have conferenced about Katie’s behavior many times. Brannan’s not surprised she’s picked up overreacting and yelling—you don’t have to be at the Vines residence for too long to hear Caleb hollering from his room, where he sometimes hides for 18, 20 hours at a time, and certainly not if you’re there during his nightmares, which Katie is. ‘She mirrors…she just mirrors’ her dad’s behavior, Brannan says. She can’t get Katie to stop picking at the sores on her legs, sores she digs into her own skin with anxious little fingers. She is not, according to Brannan, ‘a normal, carefree six-year-old.'”

Source: Mother Jones
Published: Jan 17, 2013
Length: 36 minutes (9,091 words)

America’s Real Criminal Element: Lead

Why are violent crime rates still dropping, even during the recession? The latest evidence suggests lead—in the air, in our gasoline, in our paint—was responsible for the rise in crime in the 1960s & ’70s, and the drop in the 1990s:

“And with that we have our molecule: tetraethyl lead, the gasoline additive invented by General Motors in the 1920s to prevent knocking and pinging in high-performance engines. As auto sales boomed after World War II, and drivers in powerful new cars increasingly asked service station attendants to ‘fill ‘er up with ethyl,’ they were unwittingly creating a crime wave two decades later.

“It was an exciting conjecture, and it prompted an immediate wave of…nothing. Nevin’s paper was almost completely ignored, and in one sense it’s easy to see why—Nevin is an economist, not a criminologist, and his paper was published in Environmental Research, not a journal with a big readership in the criminology community. What’s more, a single correlation between two curves isn’t all that impressive, econometrically speaking. Sales of vinyl LPs rose in the postwar period too, and then declined in the ’80s and ’90s. Lots of things follow a pattern like that. So no matter how good the fit, if you only have a single correlation it might just be a coincidence. You need to do something more to establish causality.”

Author: Kevin Drum
Source: Mother Jones
Published: Jan 3, 2013
Length: 21 minutes (5,326 words)

Big Sugar’s Sweet Little Lies

Internal memos and documents show how the sugar industry worked to cover up evidence of its dangerous health effects:

“In January 1976, the GRAS committee published its preliminary conclusions, noting that while sugar probably contributed to tooth decay, it was not a ‘hazard to the public.’ The draft review dismissed the diabetes link as ‘circumstantial’ and called the connection to cardiovascular disease ‘less than clear,’ with fat playing a greater role. The only cautionary note, besides cavities, was that all bets were off if sugar consumption were to increase significantly. The committee then thanked the Sugar Association for contributing ‘information and data.’ (Tatem would later remark that while he was ‘proud of the credit line…we would probably be better off without it.’)

The committee’s perspective was shared by many researchers, but certainly not all. For a public hearing on the draft review, scientists from the USDA’s Carbohydrate Nutrition Laboratory submitted what they considered ‘abundant evidence that sucrose is one of the dietary factors responsible for obesity, diabetes, and heart disease.’ As they later explained in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, some portion of the public—perhaps 15 million Americans at that time—clearly could not tolerate a diet rich in sugar and other carbohydrates. Sugar consumption, they said, should come down by ‘a minimum of 60 percent,’ and the government should launch a national campaign ‘to inform the populace of the hazards of excessive sugar consumption.’ But the committee stood by its conclusions in the final version of its report presented to the FDA in October 1976.”

Source: Mother Jones
Published: Oct 31, 2012
Length: 20 minutes (5,042 words)

Solitary in Iran Nearly Broke Me. Then I Went Inside America’s Prisons

The writer, a former American prisoner in Iran, goes inside America’s prisons and examines the solitary confinement system. He discovers “a recipe for abuse and violation rights”:

“As I read the medical literature, I remember the violent fantasies that sometimes seized my mind so fully that not even meditation—with which I luckily had a modicum of experience before I was jailed—would chase them away. Was the uncontrollable banging on my cell door, the pounding of my fists into my mattress, just a common symptom of isolation? I wonder what happens when someone with a history of violence is seized by such uncontrollable rage. A 2003 study of inmates at the Pelican Bay SHU by University of California-Santa Cruz psychology professor Craig Haney found that 88 percent of the SHU population experiences irrational anger, nearly 30 times more than the US population at large.

“Haney says there hasn’t been a single study of involuntary solitary confinement that didn’t show negative psychiatric symptoms after 10 days. He found that a full 41 percent of SHU inmates reported hallucinations. Twenty-seven percent have suicidal thoughts. CDCR’s own data shows that, from 2007 to 2010, inmates in isolation killed themselves at eight times the rate of the general prison population.

“In the SHU, people diagnosed with mental illnesses like depression—which afflicts, according to Haney, 77 percent of SHU inmates—only see a psychologist once every 30 days. Anyone whose mental illness qualifies as ‘serious’ (the criterion for which is ‘possible breaks with reality,’ according to Pelican Bay’s chief of mental health, Dr. Tim McCarthy) must be removed from the SHU. When they are, they get sent to a special psychiatric unit—where they are locked up in solitary. Some 364 prisoners are there today.”

Source: Mother Jones
Published: Oct 18, 2012
Length: 34 minutes (8,518 words)

Inside the Obama Campaign’s Hard Drive

Harper Reed went from running a T-shirt community to running digital operations for Obama’s reelection campaign. Inside the team’s top-secret efforts to refine voter targeting to a granular (or: “creepy”) level:

“By the 2000 election, political data firms like Aristotle had begun purchasing consumer data in bulk from companies like Acxiom. Now campaigns didn’t just know you were a pro-choice teacher who once gave $40 to save the endangered Rocky Mountain swamp gnat; they also could have a data firm sort you by what type of magazines you subscribed to and where you bought your T-shirts. The fifth source, the increasingly powerful email lists, track which blasts you respond to, the links you click on, and whether you unsubscribe.

“In the past, this information has been compartmentalized within various segments of the campaign. It existed in separate databases, powered by different kinds of software that could not communicate with each other. The goal of Project Narwhal was to link all of this data together. Once Reed and his team had integrated the databases, analysts could identify trends and craft sharper messages calibrated to appeal to individual voters. For example, if the campaign knows that a particular voter in northeastern Ohio is a pro-life Catholic union member, it will leave him off email blasts relating to reproductive rights and personalize its pitch by highlighting Obama’s role in the auto bailout—or Romney’s outsourcing past.”

Author: Tim Murphy
Source: Mother Jones
Published: Oct 2, 2012
Length: 13 minutes (3,417 words)

Everything You’ve Heard About Failing Schools Is Wrong

The story of an immigrant student, Maria, and how one “failing” San Francisco high school is helping her get ahead:

“Maria’s middle-school experience all but ensured she’d join the 52 percent of foreign-born Latinos who drop out of high school. She graduated from eighth grade without learning to speak English. She had a hard time writing in Spanish and didn’t know how to multiply.

“And then everything changed. At Mission High, the struggling school she’d chosen against the advice of her friends and relatives, Maria earned high grades in math and some days caught herself speaking English even with her Spanish-speaking teachers. By 11th grade, she wrote long papers on complex topics like desegregation and the war in Iraq. She became addicted to winning debates in class, despite her shyness and heavy accent. In her junior year, she became the go-to translator and advocate for her mother, her aunts, and for other Latino kids at school. In March, Maria and her teachers were celebrating acceptance letters to five colleges and two prestigious scholarships, including one from Dave Eggers’ writing center, 826 Valencia.

“But on the big state tests—the days-long multiple-choice exams that students in California take once a year—Maria scored poorly. And these standardized tests, she understood, were how her school was graded. According to the scores, Mission High is among the lowest-performing 5 percent of schools in the country, and it has consistently failed to meet the ever-rising benchmarks set by the federal No Child Left Behind Act.”

Source: Mother Jones
Published: Aug 21, 2012
Length: 28 minutes (7,238 words)

Everyone Only Wants Temps

The blue-collar temp industry is booming, which doesn’t bode well for people searching for long-term, full-time jobs. A look at Labor Ready, which wants to be “the McDonalds of the temp industry”:

“In the two weeks that I spend working out of Oakland’s Labor Ready branch, my ‘honest pay’ tops out at $8.75 an hour. I’ll clean a yard for a trucking firm, scrape industrial glue from cement floors for a construction company, and screw on the caps of bottles at an massage oil company whose “Making Love” line is a bestseller. I’ll also move heavy tools for a multinational corporation that repairs boilers on ships and be asked to serve food at Oakland A’s games for Aramark, a $13 billion powerhouse. I wasn’t able to take that one, but if I had, I would have been earning $8 an hour next to unionized workers making $14.30.

“Labor Ready’s Oakland workforce is nearly entirely black, excepting the branch manager, who is white. Most of the workers I talk to are searching for stability but finding it elusive. They include homeowners in foreclosure, apartment-dwellers who are being evicted, and residents of motels negotiating for a few more days. And many express hope they can parlay a temp gig into something permanent. ‘I’ve been with Labor Ready for over a year now and still haven’t had any luck,’ says Stanley, who resembles a young Eddie Murphy. We’re standing in a dusty lot in Hayward, 15 miles south of Oakland, surrounded by 300 cars that have seen better days. ‘Most jobs are like this one, not looking to hire anyone full time.'”

Source: Mother Jones
Published: Jul 16, 2012
Length: 17 minutes (4,255 words)