On Tuesday, a King County Superior Court judge ruled that the Washington State Health Care Authority was in violation of the State's new Mental Health Parity Act. The Health Care Authority was challenged on a policy of excluding treatments for autism from coverage. more ›

King County Superior Court's Judge Palmer Robinson sentenced James A. Williams to a 35-year sentence for the slaying of 31-year-old Shannon Harps on Capitol Hill, on New Year's Eve 2007. "Williams pleaded guilty to first-degree murder last week rather than proceed to trial and, conceivably, mount an insanity defense," reports the P-I, which earlier took an in-depth look at how a known paranoid schizophrenic with a long history of violence and assault was walking around Capitol Hill. In 2006, the cost of prison incarceration in Washington was $26,736. At 35 years, that's $935,760. Mental health care in Washington was cut nine percent in the proposed 2009-11 budget. more ›

[UPDATE: This post has been edited to reflect corrections made by David Dobbs to his original post, which we quoted below.] more ›

Dawdy over at Seattle's mental health blog Furious Seasons has been critical of Harvard child psychiatrist Joseph Biederman pretty much since he started his site, labeling him the leader of the "Harvard bipolar kid mafia." But even he didn't know Biederman was strong-arming pharmaceutical companies for dollars in exchange for moving "forward the commercial goals of J&J" (Johnson & Johnson being the makers of Risperdal, which Biederman was touting for use with children and adolescents). This comes on the heels of NPR yanking the Infinite Mind show after host Fred Goodwin was revealed to have accepted pharmaceutical dollars without mentioning his conflict of interest. More, no doubt, to come. more ›

Traffic was snarled on Aurora for about two hours this morning, as police closed lanes to try to talk down a man threatening to jump from the Aurora Bridge. The P-I says he is in his mid-30s, fell 150 feet into a parking lot, and survived the fall. He was alive when taken to the hospital--probably Harborview, we imagine. This local blogger saw the traffic jam and wondered how hard it would be to justify increasing mental health coverage, given the cost of the stalled commute. But we seem more likely to build a fence instead. more ›

Seattle mental health blogger Philip Dawdy got some blogosphere blowback for a short piece he wrote mentioning David Foster Wallace's suicide. Dawdy's contention is that psych meds are falsely touted as failsafe lifesavers, when he estimates they work only 30 to 50 percent of the time, and of course come with substantial side effects. In response to commenters who accused him of going too far, in his criticism and in pulling in the shade of DFW, Dawdy responded with a post that sums up the mission of his site, ending with: "Besides, compared to Keith Olberman, Bill O'Reilly and Lou Dobbs I am a goddamned Zen Buddhist." [Arrested Development Narrator VO: "And that is how you close a post!"] more ›

Psych Central, "the Internet's largest and oldest independent mental health network created and run by mental health professionals to provide reliable, trusted information and self-help support communities, for over 16 years," has named Philip Dawdy's Furious Seasons blog #1 in its Top Ten of 2008 list of bipolar blogs. Dawdy was actually #2 last year, so it's not a come-from-behind win, but the praise is warm indeed: "He’s an excellent journalist whose blog has become synonymous with unrestrained investigative writing on bipolar disorder, mental health treatments and the pharma industry. He does not hesitate to call out BS when he finds it, and he digs for it harder than any other popular writer. Furious Seasons is an invaluable service to the mental health community." To think we knew him when. more ›

Yesterday we picked up on Seattle mental health blogger Philip Dawdy's post about the FDA boldly going where no medical body has gone before: approving two atypical antipsychotics for use in treating "pediatric bipolar disorder." The only problem is this disorder's existence is still controversial, let alone its treatment with drugs recommended for schizophrenia. It's not the FDA's job to innovate in medical treatments, but to regulate them. Today Dawdy drops the other shoe: the FDA's phone-shy psychiatry products chief, Thomas Laughren, "was deeply involved in helping 'America's Pharmaceutical Research Companies' design clinical trials for the disorder." How Bush administration of him. more ›

Seattle blogger Philip Dawdy, who covers mental health issues over at Furious Seasons, used to be a print journalist, and has won awards from the National Mental Health Association for his work. more ›

We're having kind of a difficult time even finding words for this one—maybe because our sister is also very pregnant and we've been awaiting news for weeks now of the baby's safe arrival. But, according to KOMO News: "A pregnant woman [in Kennewick] was stabbed multiple times in the chest and her nearly full-term baby was cut from her womb. A second woman has been arrested. The baby has been hospitalized in critical condition." The woman's 23-year-old attacker bound her hands and feet with yarn. more ›

Running text ads on your blog never really struck us as the Get-Richest-Quickest path; we used to have Amazon ads on a book review blog and after a year or two and no checks, we decided we could better use the real estate and quit the program. A few months later we got our first and final check for...$6ish? But Seattle's Furious Seasons blog has just discovered firsthand the pain of algorithmic rejection. The email... more ›