Mental Health and Disorders

Subterms

    More stories

    • 125 Shares149 Views

      in Elections

      John Hinckley Jr. and the Madness of American Political Violence

      by

      In September 2016, three and a half decades after he shot President Ronald Reagan in a deranged bid to impress the actress Jodie Foster — a crime for which he was found not guilty by reason of insanity — John W. Hinckley Jr. was released from St. Elizabeths psychiatric hospital in Washington, D.C. From there, he moved to Williamsburg, Va., where he lived for some years with his elderly mother, Jo Ann, in a large house overlooking the 13th hole of a golf course. The federal court that granted his release did so on certain conditions. One of these was that he must not speak to the media. Another was that Hinckley, who was a songwriter for some years before the failed assassination attempt, and who continued to play music as part of his psychiatric treatment, must not release for public consumption, even anonymously, any of his work, without the specific approval of the treatment team entrusted with his care.After his arrest, Hinckley was diagnosed with, among other conditions, atypical psychosis and severe narcissistic personality disorder; his extravagantly strange and violent actions had been bound up in a toxic fascination with celebrity and an egomaniacal glee at the fame those actions brought him. Although Hinckley’s treatment was successful, and the judge was satisfied that he presented a very low risk of reoffending, the restrictions were intended to ensure that he neither courted nor was courted by the media and that his mental stability would not be threatened in the immediate aftermath of his release by widespread attention.In 2022, not long after his mother died, the last of those restrictions were lifted. More than four decades after shooting Ronald Reagan — along with a Secret Service agent named Timothy McCarthy, a police officer named Thomas Delahanty and Reagan’s press secretary, James Brady, who was left permanently disabled — he was, at 67 years of age, truly free. Hinckley had by then opened a Twitter account and amassed thousands of followers. On June 15, 2022, the day the restrictions were lifted, he posted the following: “After 41 years 2 months and 15 days, FREEDOM AT LAST!!!” His following grew, and he quickly began to use his platform to release music and promote upcoming gigs. He announced a total of a dozen performances. Unsurprisingly, these shows got a lot of attention and began to sell out. But every single one of them was canceled before he could play, as a result of backlash, including anonymous threatening emails, received by the venues.This made Hinckley a figure of prurient interest on social media. When he posted about his excitement for an upcoming show, for instance, along with a selfie in which he stared directly at the camera with a glazed and entirely affectless expression, the replies were a chorus of ironic quips and jokes. Someone replied with a GIF of Travis Bickle clapping — a reference to Hinckley’s infamous inspiration for his crime, an obsession with “Taxi Driver” and with Jodie Foster, who played the teenage prostitute Iris in the film. “Haven’t heard his new stuff but I like his earlier work,” read another. (Jokes about Hinckley’s “early work” follow him everywhere online.) For a majority of people who encountered his internet presence, Hinckley was an absurd and quintessentially American aberration: a guy who shot, and very nearly killed, the president and was somehow still alive to sing his songs about peace and love and redemption.Hinckley at his office in Williamsburg, Va., in June.Stefan Ruiz for The New York TimesThen, 43 years after that near assassination, in Butler, Pa., a 20-year-old loner named Thomas Matthew Crooks took several shots at Donald Trump with a semiautomatic rifle, wounding the former president’s right ear and plunging an already dark and chaotic world even deeper into darkness and chaos. Hinckley now became the focus of a different kind of interest. After the shooting, he posted the following message on the platform now known as X: “Violence is not the way to go. Give peace a chance.” He was quoting his old hero John Lennon, who was himself murdered by a strange and sick and lonely young man with a gun. The tweet provoked a by-now predictable response. There were GIFs of Jodie Foster looking haunted (“Hope she sees this bro”) and of Travis Bickle talking to himself in the mirror. There was an article in The Guardian headlined “Man Who Tried to Assassinate Reagan Says ‘Violence Is Not the Way to Go.’ ” Mostly, people seemed to be able to respond to the message only as evidence of the further derangement of things.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 150 Shares189 Views

      in Elections

      Army Sees No Link to Blast Exposure in Maine Gunman’s Mental Issues

      by

      Investigators found lapses in the handling of a troubled reservist who went on to kill 18 people, but they rejected suggestions that his Army work had damaged his brain.An Army investigation into the October 2023 mass shooting committed by an Army Reserve soldier, Robert Card II, found that a number of factors contributed to the Army’s inaction as Mr. Card’s mental health careened toward violence, including procedural breakdowns, missteps by commanders and rules that restrict military authority over reserve soldiers when they are out of uniform.But the report said the Army saw no link between his mental health problems and the years he spent working as a grenade instructor, repeatedly exposed to explosions on the practice range.Every summer for eight years, Mr. Card taught cadets at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point to use heavy weapons, including machine guns and shoulder-fired anti-tank guns. For five of those years, he worked on the grenade range, where about 2,400 grenades exploded over a two-week period. By age 40, he wore hearing aids.Last July, he was supposed to run machine-gun training for cadets, despite having missed a mandatory training session in the spring, the report said. But he was behaving so erratically in July that his Army Reserve commander had him hospitalized at a civilian psychiatric hospital in New York.Lt. Gen. Jody J. Daniels said the blasts Robert Card II had experienced in his Army Reserve service were “relatively minor.” The general administered an oath to new service members at a football game in 2022.Julio Cortez/Associated PressThe hospital determined that Mr. Card was experiencing psychosis and homicidal thoughts and had a “hit list.” Doctors moved to commit the soldier involuntarily for treatment, but the effort was dropped by the hospital under what the Army report called “questionable circumstances,” and Mr. Card was released after 19 days.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 100 Shares189 Views

      in Elections

      Moving In Childhood Contributes to Depression, Study Finds

      by

      A study of more than a million Danes found that frequent moves in childhood had a bigger effect than poverty on adult mental health risk.In recent decades, mental health providers began screening for “adverse childhood experiences” — generally defined as abuse, neglect, violence, family dissolution and poverty — as risk factors for later disorders.But what if other things are just as damaging?Researchers who conducted a large study of adults in Denmark, published on Wednesday in the journal JAMA Psychiatry, found something they had not expected: Adults who moved frequently in childhood have significantly more risk of suffering from depression than their counterparts who stayed put in a community.In fact, the risk of moving frequently in childhood was significantly greater than the risk of living in a poor neighborhood, said Clive Sabel, a professor at the University of Plymouth and the paper’s lead author.“Even if you came from the most income-deprived communities, not moving — being a ‘stayer’ — was protective for your health,” said Dr. Sabel, a geographer who studies the effect of environment on disease.“I’ll flip it around by saying, even if you come from a rich neighborhood, but you moved more than once, that your chances of depression were higher than if you hadn’t moved and come from the poorest quantile neighborhoods,” he added.The study, a collaboration by Aarhus University, the University of Manchester and the University of Plymouth, included all Danes born between 1982 and 2003, more than a million people. Of those, 35,098, or around 2.3 percent, received diagnoses of depression from a psychiatric hospital.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 88 Shares169 Views

      in Elections

      This Is Literally Your Brain on Drugs

      by

      A small new study shows reactions in the brain in people who were given psilocybin in a controlled setting.If you had to come up with a groovy visualization of the human brain on psychedelic drugs, it might look something like this.Sara Moser/Washington University School of MedicineThe image, as it happens, comes from dozens of brain scans produced by researchers at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis who gave psilocybin, the compound in “magic mushrooms,” to participants in a study before sending them into a functional M.R.I. scanner.The kaleidoscopic whirl of colors they recorded is essentially a heat map of brain changes, with the red, orange and yellow hues reflecting a significant departure from normal activity patterns. The blues and greens reflect normal brain activity that occurs in the so-called functional networks, the neural communication pathways that connect different regions of the brain.The scans, published Wednesday in the journal Nature, offer a rare glimpse into the wild neural storm associated with mind-altering drugs. Researchers say they could provide a potential road map for understanding how psychedelic compounds like psilocybin, LSD and MDMA can lead to lasting relief from depression, anxiety and other mental health disorders.“Psilocybin, in contrast to any other drug we’ve tested, has this massive effect on the whole brain that was pretty unexpected,” said Dr. Nico Dosenbach, a professor of neurology at Washington University and a senior author of the study. “It was quite shocking when we saw the effect size.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 100 Shares189 Views

      in Elections

      How Your Body and Mind Change in Midlife

      by

      Midlife, typically defined as ages 40 to 60, is an inflection point. It’s a time when our past behaviors begin to catch up with us and we start to notice our bodies and minds aging — sometimes in frustrating or disconcerting ways. But it’s also an opportunity: What our older years will look and feel […] More

    • 113 Shares149 Views

      in Elections

      Alexi Pappas: You Can’t Run From Your Fears Forever

      by

      You can try your hardest to run away from your fears, but you can’t hide from them forever.This essay is part of a series called The Big Ideas, in which writers respond to a single question: What do we fear? You can read more by visiting The Big Ideas series page.“Your mommy was just so sad that she had to go.”I’ve been told this all my life. I suppose that this framing is meant to comfort me, as if my mom’s suicide was as natural, unavoidable and unfortunate as a sand castle facing its eventual collapse. I have never found this explanation reassuring, though, because she contributed to half of my DNA. I have no control over how much of my mom’s mental illness is inside of me. If her suicide was inevitable, would I face the same outcome as her? Would I one day “have to go,” too?My mom had bipolar disorder with manic depression. After developing an addiction to pain pills that were originally prescribed to treat a back injury due to pregnancy complications, she became suicidal and died in 1994, when I was 4 years old. But before she passed, she was an accomplished athlete and singer, class valedictorian and one of the first female software consultants at her company. Explain to me how, apart from genes, my mom could have so many successes … and still “have to go”? Especially since my mom’s only brother “had to go” several years later, too. Two of my own flesh and blood. They both simply “had to go”!So to say that I fear my genes is an understatement. It’s scary to be afraid of the negative traits you may have inherited. It makes you afraid of yourself. And for the longest time, the only way I could think of to avoid my mom’s fate was to rely on another, more undeniably positive aspect of my genetic makeup — my athletic ability.A researcher extracts DNA fragments at the Neurobiology lab Columbia University in Manhattan. Scientists have found that a combination of environmental and genetic factors can contribute to psychiatric illnesses.Jeenah Moon for The New York TimesIn addition to a predisposition toward mental illness, I also inherited an undeniable athletic talent: the ability to run long distances. So, I concentrated my efforts on becoming an Olympian. Because forever an Olympian, forever happy, right?We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 138 Shares149 Views

      in Elections

      I Just Went on Vacation. How Am I Still Burned Out?

      by

      Time away can make work stress even more apparent. Here’s what to do about it.The email does not find you well.Yesterday, you were lounging on the beach, or sprawled on the couch with that book you finally had time to finish. Now, you’re staring down hundreds of missed messages.The return to work after vacation can be jarring for anyone. But for people who are burned out from their jobs — a state that psychologists describe as feeling persistently exhausted and cynical about work — the transition is even tougher.While vacation might seem like the obvious solution to being overwhelmed by work, time away can reveal just how depleted you’ve become, said Jeanette M. Bennett, an associate professor at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte who studies the effects of stress on health.How to know if you’re burned out.Burnout stems from feeling like you don’t have control over your work. People can dread their jobs, experiencing “the quintessential ‘I’m overwhelmed, I’m exhausted, Sunday Scaries’” feeling, said Dr. Thea Gallagher, a clinical psychologist and associate professor at NYU Langone Health.Burnout bleeds into the rest of your life: people typically feel like they don’t have the energy to do anything except get through the day. Family responsibilities, friends and hobbies can fall by the wayside — even if people have the time for those activities outside of work, they may be too tired, or feel apathetic about them, said Angela Neal-Barnett, a psychology professor at Kent State University and author of “Soothe Your Nerves: The Black Woman’s Guide to Understanding and Overcoming Anxiety, Panic and Fear.”Taking time off can relieve burnout in some cases — people come back to work feeling recharged and better able to tackle their workload. But when people are intensely stressed, vacation is more like a Band-Aid. They might feel better when they’re away, but as soon as it’s time to return, they become anxious again.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 88 Shares129 Views

      in Elections

      Hunter Biden’s Conviction, and a Family’s Pain

      by

      Readers discuss addiction, call for compassion and praise how the president has supported his son.To the Editor:Re “President’s Son Is Found Guilty on Gun Charges” (front page, June 12):President Biden lost his first wife and daughter in a car accident. He lost his son Beau to brain cancer. Hunter Biden, his other son, has just been found guilty of felony charges involving gun possession.We live in a painfully polarized time. But I would argue that, regardless of party affiliation, compassion and empathy are warranted in acknowledging our shared humanity. While pundits will no doubt turn their focus to political fallout, we should not lose sight of the big picture: These are real people, with real lives, and real suffering.Larry S. SandbergNew YorkThe writer is a psychiatrist.To the Editor:Re “One Thing Everyone Has Missed About Hunter Biden’s Case,” by Patti Davis (Opinion guest essay, June 12):Addiction is a disease, and neither intelligence, education or great family support can prevent it. Such things also do not prevent cancer, mental illness, Parkinson’s or any other disease.Hunter Biden fell prey to addiction, and as a result made bad choices that got him into trouble and have troubled his loving family to this day, even though he has been sober for a while, and hopefully will continue to be — although prison is not a good environment for an addict trying to stay sober!If Hunter Biden weren’t the president’s son, he likely would not have even been on trial for something he did that thousands of addicts do in our gun-loving society, and get away with.Can we ever get away from politicizing everything? Not in the current divisive climate.Patti Davis’s article is right on! And beautifully written.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More