Mental Health Is Worth A Blog

Activist journalism is a shifting target -- yesterday's activism doesn't always apply. (You'd hope because it's been assimilated by the mainstream.) Here's the classic face of mental illness local media usually provides. But regular, conscientious reporting has got to focus more on the wealth of treatment modalities and medications "made available" to people who may or may not be able to judge between them. And how even doctors are snowed under by pharmaceutical data.

We've been following Activist Journalist Philip Dawdy's mental health blog, Furious Seasons, via RSS for a while now, but he's really been burning the blog oil lately. His follow-up to his Seattle Weekly story on a cop fired for being bipolar is news we haven't read elsewhere.

Holland, for those of you new to this story, was a veteran KCSO deputy who, in June 2004, revealed she had bipolar disorder. She'd done nothing wrong on the job and, in fact, was considered a good cop and had numerous commendations... She outed herself because she'd had some meds go south on her, needed to make a switch, and had to have time off to make it work. For this, she was fired four months later -- a very fast turnaround for firing a cop.

Meanwhile, the same department didn't fire and, as it turns out, hardly disciplined a veritable rogue's gallery of other KCSO deputies who did some very bad things on and off-duty. Think I am making that up? Read this series by the Seattle Post-Intelligencer.

18 months later, Holland has gotten a little of her own back:

Holland, three weeks before her case was scheduled to go to trial, walked out with money, an agreement by the Sheriff to reclassify her firing from "medical termination" to "medical retirement," and an agreement by the Sheriff to provide Holland with a letter of recommendation... The people who doubted the story I wrote about Holland, or felt it was too activist-ish, have been proven wrong. They can go fuck off now.

Dawdy's also been hot on the trail of Big Pharma, a sector insufficiently covered by media of any stripe, given how many Americans are getting the news in a medicated state. Here he is on kid meds, too many meds, med sales practices, meds that may give you diabetes, meds that may make you want to kill yourself.

It's great that Dawdy has stepped up for a huge, mainly voiceless population, but on the other hand, it's weird to see citizen journalists so responsible for watchdogging our mental health industry. When we hear newspapers complain about declining readership, we can't help but think it's mainly because -- gosh, this is awkward -- the shit they're reporting on isn't newsworthy. And this shit is.