Tag: mental illness

Trans Florida teacher ‘Ashlee’ who allegedly said they were ‘going to shoot the kids’ then themselves remains in classroom despite parents’ complaints

Parents of students at Fox Chapel Middle School in Hernando County, Florida, are demanding answers from the district after a teacher made concerning comments allegedly made about harming children and themselves. Although the district investigated the comments and found them concerning, the teacher was not fired and is back in the classroom.

Several parents contacted FOX 13, with each sharing the same story that the teacher made comments about harming students and then herself.

The district stated that the comments were made out of frustration with student behavior, but refused to divulge exactly what was said, leading to tension between parents and the board. “While the teacher in question did make a comment to colleagues that was concerning,” the school principal could be heard saying in a recording sent to parents on Monday. “Staff and law enforcement determined the comment was not an imminent threat to the campus, but was instead an expression of frustration at student behavior.”

A sheriff’s office report from March 24, obtained by Moms for Liberty Hernando County, stated that a school resource officer responded to a report from Assistant Principal Kerry Thornton and Guidance Counselor Kimberly Walby, who reported that a teacher had made statements about harming themself and possibly shooting students.

Thornton told the resource officer that at around 3 pm, she was visiting classrooms and walked into teacher Ashlee Renczkowski’s classroom. Thornton asked how the teacher was doing, to which Renczkowski responded, “Not good, I’m having bad thoughts.”

Thornton radioed Walby and said that Renczkowski was coming to see her. According to the report, “Ashlee walked to Kimberley’s office and started to explain that she learned about a social media post where people were talking negatively about Ashlee’s sexual orientation.”

The post in question was in regard to Renczkowski and Renczkowski’s wife, Fawn Renczkowski, who also teaches at the school.

According to Fox Chapel’s staff directory, Ashlee Renczkowski teaches mathematics for grades six through eight, and Fawn Renczkowski teaches science for grades six through eight.

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INDIANA JAIL LET MAN WITH SCHIZOPHRENIA STARVE TO DEATH IN SOLITARY, LAWSUIT ALLEGES

On July 20, 2021, apartment managers entered 29-year-old Indiana resident Joshua McLemore’s home, found him confused, incoherent, and nude on the floor, and had McLemore transported to a Seymour, Indiana, hospital. McLemore’s mother had called her son’s living complex, worried he could have been having a psychotic episode. At the hospital, McLemore grabbed a nurse’s hair and the Seymour Police Department arrested him on battery charges.

At the Jackson County Jail, McLemore, who had schizophrenia, was stripped naked and thrown into solitary confinement in what was known as “Padded Cell 7,” a small room without toilet access.

Surveillance footage over 21 days shows him screaming; rocking back and forth; licking the walls; smearing his feces and urine all over the floor; violently shoving a plastic bottle into his rectum; throwing his food on the ground; and eating the styrofoam food trays that made their way through the thin slot at the cell door.

According to the lawsuit, he lost 45 pounds in less than a month. Jail staff rarely checked in on him. Jackson County Sheriff’s Office (JCSO) employees occasionally placed McLemore in restraints and wheeled him into a shower as JCSO forced other imprisoned people to clean the excrement in his cell. On August 8, a guard named Beverly texted her supervisor, “Just bathed him. And he can’t hold his hands, legs, anything. He’s dead weight.”

In the footage, McLemore’s body visibly shrinks over weeks until he doesn’t have the strength to hold his head up.

“Get up, buddy,” a corrections officer asks. But he can’t. In one portion of the footage, a female guard sprays him with liquid soap and hoses him down so that he does not smell before EMS comes.

On August 8, jail officials noticed that McLemore—visibly emaciated and unable to hold up his body—likely needed medical care. But medical officials were unable to save him. According to a suit, doctors listed McLemore’s cause of death as “multiple organ failure due to refusal to eat or drink with altered mental status due to untreated schizophrenia.”

McLemore’s family alleges that at least 20 people, including Sheriff Rick Meyer, had access to roughly 400 hours of footage of McLemore wasting away in his cell. Edwin Budge, the family’s attorney, said he could not understand why no one called 911 earlier.

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Abrupt closure of ketamine clinic chain blindsides veterans and others with severe depression and chronic pain

Military veterans across the country are scrambling after more than a dozen clinics that had been providing them with free ketamine treatments for severe depression, chronic pain or post-traumatic stress disorder suddenly closed.

Patients and employees of the Ketamine Wellness Centers, or KWC, said they were blindsided when the company, one of the nation’s largest operators of ketamine clinics, announced on its website on March 10 that it had shuttered all 13 of its locations in nine states.

“I cried for days,” said Travis Zubick, a U.S. Navy veteran, who was a patient at the company’s Minnesota location. “They packed up and left town, and that’s over.”

Zubick and about 50 other former service members had been relying on KWC’s partnership with the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs for free ketamine treatments.

Now, many are rushing to find another facility that takes their VA insurance before the effects of their last treatment wear off.

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The 9-question survey many doctors use to diagnose depression was actually created by an antidepressant manufacturer

If your doctor suspects you might have depression, there’s a go-to questionnaire they might pull out with nine questions to answer about how you’ve been feeling over the past two weeks.

The questions touch on a range of potential issues, from sleep disturbances, to appetite changes, concentration issues, and your general enjoyment of life.  

Many experts say this tool, called the PHQ-9, was never meant to be a definitive diagnostic test aimed at diagnosing mental health issues. It was designed as a first-ditch screening tool; a conversation starter between doctor and patient.

But for primary care physicians strapped for time in the exam room, it is often used as a stand-in for a more in-depth clinical evaluation — a go-to prescribing tool for antidepressants.

Critics say the issue is that it this tool was developed by Pfizer, shortly after Zoloft came on the market. 

“These forms have a very low criteria for anxiety and depression,” UK-based psychotherapist James Davies, co-founder of the Council for Evidence-based Psychiatry, told the Telegraph in 2017. “It’s about getting people in and out of the door in 10 minutes,” often, with a prescription in hand. 

As reporter Olivia Goldhill details in a wide-ranging Stat report out this week, the marketer who first dreamed up the idea for what later became the PHQ-9 — the quick tool that ultimately made many primary care doctors more comfortable prescribing antidepressants from exam rooms worldwide — was a “marketing man” working for Pfizer. Howard Kroplick convinced the company to invest in the pricey research required to develop the now-ubiquitous questionnaire. 

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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.

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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.

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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.”

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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.

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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.

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