psychiatry | Memory Hole Blog

Los Angeles and Chicago Also on Board

[Editor’s Note: We are not surprised that the 2012 Sandy Hook massacre event has culminated in its participants’ direct intervention in the public schooling process through implementation of behavioral/ mental health programs. This trajectory has been evident since at least early 2013 and reported on at MHB (i.e. here and here). Such measures also involve overt and coordinated maneuvers of the Obama administration harnessing such federal agencies as the Department of Health of Human Services and Department of Education to further make over public education in a fashion similar to Scotland’s cradle-to-grave Getting It Right For Every Child. As noted in late 2014,

Using the Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre as its justification, the Obama administration has recently given the psychiatric business and pharmaceutical industry a major gift by quietly introducing a behavioral and mental health program in public schools throughout the United States. The maneuver was initially laid out on January 16, 2013 in President Obama’s executive policy, Now is the Time: The President’s Plan to Protect Our Children and Our Communities by Reducing Gun Violence.

The document is partly devoted to articulating Obama’s proposed gun control measures that failed to move gain legislative traction in 2013. Yet an under-reported section of Now is the Time is applied to “making schools safer” and “improving mental health services” for students.

‘Obama’s Mental Health Mandate,’ November 4, 2014.

In September 2014, for example, DHS put $99 million toward ‘mental health provider training’ for public schools, while DOE allotted $70 million to create “School Climate Transformation Grants” along shared lines.-JFT]

KYRA GURNEY
Miami Herald
(September 19, 2016)

For Nicole Hockley, the mother of a child killed during the Sandy Hook Elementary School shootings, this week marks an important milestone on a journey that began with her 6-year-old son Dylan’s death four years ago.

sandy-hook085-jai — Tracy Mourning (left) gives Nicole Hockley, Founder and Managing Director of Sandy Hook Promise (right) a butterfly pendant she was wearing. Miami-Dade County Public Schools is launching a district-wide violence prevention program in all of its schools in partnership with Sandy Hook Promise, an organization founded by families affected by the Newtown, CT, shooting four years ago. José A. Iglesias jiglesias@elnuevoherald.com

On Monday, Miami-Dade became the first school district in the country to implement Sandy Hook Promise — a violence-prevention program founded by Hockley and others who lost family members during the massacre — in all of its schools.

Continue reading Sandy Hook ‘Violence-Prevention Program’ Launches in Florida Public Schools →

And the Perils of Being a Drugged-up Insomniac Celebrity

By Gary G. Kohls, MD
PPJ Gazette

55 years ago (July 2, 1961) an American literary icon, Ernest Hemingway, committed suicide at his beloved vacation retreat in Ketchum, Idaho. He had just flown to Ketchum after being discharged from a psychiatric ward at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, MN where he had received a series of electroconvulsive “treatments” (ECT) for a life-long depression that had started after he had experienced the horrors of World War I. In the “War To End All Wars: he had been a non-combatant ambulance driver and stretcher-bearer.

220px-Robin_Williams_2011a_(2) — Image Credit: Wikipedia

One of Hemingway’s wartime duties was to retrieve the mutilated bodies of living and dead humans and the body parts of the dead ones from the Italian sector of the WWI battle zone. In more modern times his MOS (military occupational specialty) might have been called Grave’s Registration, a job that – in the Vietnam War – had one of the highest incidences of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) that arose in that war’s aftermath.

Hemingway, just like many of the combat-induced PTSD victims of every war, was likely haunted for the rest of his life by the horrific images of the wounded and dead, so there was no question that he had what was later to be understood as combat-induced PTSD with depression, panic attacks, nightmares, auditory and/or visual hallucinations and insomnia.

Continue reading The Drug-Induced Suicide of Robin Williams Two Years Later →