Tag: mental illness

Social Media Is Influencing Teens To Adopt Mental Illness Identities, Researchers Say

Researchers have examined the troubling trend of teens self-diagnosing mental illness through social media. 

A new paper published earlier this month in Comprehensive Psychiatry proposed that “social contagion” through prolonged social media use can explain why some teens, mostly adolescent females, self-diagnose their purported rare mental illnesses and personality disorders online. 

“We believe there is an urgent need for focused empirical research investigation into this concerning phenomenon that is related to the broader research and discourse examining social media influences on mental health,” said the study’s lead author, John D. Haltigan, and co-author, Gayathiri Rajkumar, in a recent article for Reality’s Last Stand.

The paper focused on the uptick in teens presenting with tics with no known biological cause and the resurgence of the extremely rare multiple personality disorder, now called Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID), in which a person claims to harbor multiple distinct personalities. Also mentioned are the prevalence of autism, depression, eating disorders, and gender identity-related conditions on social media. 

“That rates of teen and adolescent depression, anxiety, and suicidal ideation have risen precipitously since the advent of social media and smartphones is likely no coincidence,” the authors said.

The paper proposes that social media platforms like TikTok, whose core user base are teen girls, and the popularity of online communities that glamorize mental illness, may act as a “spread vector” for adolescents to adopt various disorders as part of their online personas.

Keep reading

UK Doctors Have Doubled Antipsychotic Prescriptions To Children And Youth: Study

Despite the lack of evidence of the safety of antipsychotics in children, who are smaller in size and still rapidly developing, the number of prescriptions to English youth has doubled between 2000 to 2019, a study suggests.

The researchers from the University of Manchester examined over seven million children and adolescents aged three to 18.

They discovered that youth prescriptions of antipsychotics – drugs used to treat major mental illnesses, such as autism, schizophrenia, and ADHD – increased from 0.06 percent to 0.11 in the past two decades.

While the percentage is small, co-author and senior research fellow at the University of Manchester Matthias Pierce said that the higher prevalence of these disorders, as well as a growing trend to prescribe antipsychotics by clinicians, is concerning.

“However, [it] will help clinicians to evaluate the prescribing of antipsychotics to children more fully and will encourage them to consider better access to alternatives,” Pierce said.

Antipsychotics have been associated with long-term side effects, including sexual dysfunction, infertility, and weight gain leading to diabetes.

Keep reading

Mayor Eric Adams to Involuntarily Hospitalize Mentally Ill New Yorkers

New York City Mayor Eric Adams (D) on Tuesday announced the city’s new plan to address mentally ill residents by hospitalizing them against their will, even if they do not pose an immediate safety risk to others.

Under Adams’ directive, New York City police officers, firefighters, and health department officials are allowed to involuntarily commit mentally ill individuals if they “cannot support their basic human needs to an extent that causes them harm.”

Previously, city officials were authorized to hospitalize mentally ill individuals who were dangerously violent and deemed an immediate threat to others. They would usually be discharged from the hospital after a few days when their conditions slightly improved.

Now, Adams’ directive authorizes “the removal of a person who appears to be mentally ill and displays an inability to meet basic living needs, even when no recent dangerous act has been observed.”

“If the circumstances support an objectively reasonable basis to conclude that the person appears to have a mental illness and cannot support their basic human needs to an extent that causes them harm, they may be removed for an evaluation,” the directive stated.

However, Adams and his staffers failed to define “basic needs” or provide any criteria for how city workers would determine if those needs are being met.

In announcing his plan, Adams claimed that the idea that city officials were only empowered to involuntarily hospitalize an individual if they are violent was a “myth” that “must be put to rest.”

Keep reading

Canadian Doctor Says College of Physicians and Surgeons of Ontario Suggests Unvaccinated Patients are Mentally Ill and Should be Put on Psychiatric Medication 

Doctors in Ontario are reportedly being advised to consider using psychiatric medicines on patients who refuse the vaccine.

During an interview at ‘Let Freedom Reign Tour,’ Physician and Cancer Researcher Dr. William Makis claimed that the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Ontario sent out a note to doctors implying that their unvaccinated patients may be suffering from a mental illness and should be prescribed psychiatric medicine.

“So this has come out recently out of the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Ontario. The college sent out a letter or a memo to all the doctors in Ontario suggesting to them now, so far, they’re not mandating it, they’re just suggesting it, that any of their unvaccinated patients, that they should consider that they have a mental problem and that they should be put on psychiatric medication. So far, it’s just a suggestion,” Dr. Makis told Lynn Tyler Thompson.

“But the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Ontario should not be making these kinds of suggestions. This is extremely unethical and this is a very, very slippery slope. If they’re suggesting that people who wish to have bodily autonomy and don’t want an experimental vaccine, that there may be something mentally wrong with them, that is a very, very dangerous, slippery slope that we’re on,” he continued.

Keep reading

Police Snipers Respond to Call for Help, Kill Man from Outside His Home as He Sat Alone in His Bedroom

As frequent readers of the Free Thought Project understand, calling police for help with a family member suffering from a mental illness, can be a dangerous decision. All too often, officers, who are trained to kill, show up to calls in which people need help, not bullets. Unfortunately, as was the case with Desman LaDuke, 22, he received the latter.

LaDuke’s family is now demanding justice and answers after police showed up last month during a call for help and executed LaDuke from outside the home as he sat alone in his bedroom.

According to Kentucky State Police, Nicholasville police received a call from LaDuke’s family notifying them that LaDuke was suicidal and needed help. A SWAT team and a crisis negotiation team responded to the scene but it appears SWAT was in control.

Police claim that after a two-hour-long standoff, they “confronted an armed individual” which resulted in the loss of life. According to the family, however, no such confrontation ever happened and a police sniper shot LaDuke in the chest from outside his home as he sat alone in his room, posing a threat to no one.

The family is now speaking out and telling the media that the original police claims are false.

“There has been very limited information released regarding the circumstances of Saturday. Much of what has been said is false. And the police have done nothing to correct it. Desman was alone in his home and inside his bedroom when he was shot, through the bedroom window, by a police officer positioned outside the home. Any suggestion that officers made entry into Desman’s home, were threatened [sic] inside the home by Desman, and shot Desman from inside the home, are false,” a letter from the family states.

According to the letter, LaDuke was struggling “with the desire to live” on October 22, and the family called the police to help him but police instead responded by ”sending the SWAT/ERT unit.”

When the family asked to go inside to talk to LaDuke during the standoff, police refused to allow them in, escalating to deadly force instead.

Keep reading

COVID-19 and Vaccine Can Cause Psychosis, Music Therapy Might Help

In April 2020, a group of doctors at Strasbourg University Hospital in France published a letter in the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) on a study of 58 ICU patients with severe SARS-CoV-2 infection during the one-month period from March 3 to April 3, 2020. Out of the 58 ICU patients, 40 showed agitation, while 26 of the 40 agitated patients had confusion according to the Confusion Assessment Method for the ICU.

Overall, the patients not only exhibited respiratory problems, but also neurologic disorders, from agitation and confusion to transient ischemic attack, partial epilepsy, and mild cognitive impairment. 

The main author of the letter, Julie Helms, M.D., Ph.D., also told the BBC that what’s more alarming is that many of these patients were young people in their 30s and 40s.

A New York Times article dated Dec. 28, 2020 talked about psychotic symptoms in people who had COVID-19. A 30-year-old construction worker in New York City recovered from COVID-19 but became delusional. He thought his relative was going to kill him, so he tried to strangle the relative in bed.

A 42-year-old mother of four experienced mild physical symptoms from COVID-19 but developed psychotic symptoms months later. She kept hearing voices telling her to kill herself and her children, and she kept seeing scenes of her children being gruesomely murdered.  

In April 2020, during the early months of the pandemic, a group of psychologists, researchers, and mental health professionals from around the world issued a call for action for mental health science in The Lancet Psychiatry. They said that there is an urgent need for research to address how mental health consequences for vulnerable groups can be mitigated under pandemic conditions. 

Keep reading

‘She wanted to choke us’: 5th grade teacher arrested after admitting to having ‘kill list’ of students and staff, police say

A fifth grade teacher has been arrested after informing one of her students that she had a “kill list” of children and colleagues, according to police.

On Wednesday, fifth grade teacher Angelica Carrasquillo-Torres reportedly told a student about a kill list she made that included students and staff at a school in East Chicago, Indiana.

“At approximately 12:45 p.m. a 5th grade student told his/her counselor that their 5th grade teacher made comments to him/her about killing herself, students, and staff at St. Stanislaus School,” East Chicago Police Department said in a statement. “The teacher further told the student that she has a list and that he/she was on the bottom of that list.”

The student involved – Portia Jones – told WLS-TV, “I’m really, like, scared and worried. She said she wanted to choke us and she wanted to kill herself.”

Jones told WBBM-TV, “She said that she wanted to kill her middle school friends, her high school friends, and half of her family.”

Keep reading