Recent Stories with tag mental health

Photo: Capitol Hill Seattle blog

Mid-morning Monday, as snow was falling, Michael LaRosa walked up to a man he didn't know and repeatedly struck the 58-year-old's head with a hatchet, killing him, say Seattle police. The murder, on the 1400 block of East Union Street, occurred in view of students in a nearby school. ("I don't know what came over me, because I've never done murder, you know," LaRosa later told detectives.)

The Seattle Times contacted LaRosa's half-brother, in Florida, who said LaRosa has been diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia, but occasionally believes he's well enough to quit taking medication. "Since moving to Seattle nearly three years ago, LaRosa had become a patient at Sound Mental Health on Capitol Hill and enrolled in Seattle Mental Health Court as part of a 2009 municipal-court case involving an assault on a security guard," reports the Times.

For Capitol Hill residents, those circumstances bring back all-too-vivid memories of the 2007 New Year's Eve murder of Shannon Harps by a Sound Mental Health patient with paranoid schizophrenia. (CHS: "In 2009, James Williams, who was receiving treatment and medication from Sound Mental Health prior to his crime, pleaded guilty to the stabbing murder of 31-year-old Shannon Harps....")

About a year ago, I wrote a piece called "King County's Mental Health is Deteriorating," based on an interview with Amnon Shoenfeld, director of the King County Mental Health, Chemical Abuse and Dependency Services Division. Schoenfeld mentioned the stress his department was under to deal with people whose mental illnesses made them unsafe for society, as funding was being cut for programs that paid for medications, and kept the dangerously unstable under constant supervision. ... (more)

If you were interested by our story about girls and autism earlier today, you might be interested in catching The Horse Boy, which shows Saturday at 1 p.m. at SIFF Cinema. It's a free screening, brought to you by ITVS Community Cinema Seattle, and they suggest you RSVP to us@communitycinemaseattle.org to guarantee you'll have a seat.

The Horse Boy is the story of Rowan, who was diagnosed with autism as a two-year-old, in 2004. It's also the story of how his father discovered his son bonded with their horse Betsy (what, you haven't heard of horse therapy?), and how--more incredibly--this led to a trip to Mongolia for more horses and shamanic healing.

The New York Times did a round-up of autism's talking heads to decide if this meant autistic kids should be shipped off to Mongolia en masse. The verdict? Horses are cool. Shamanic soul-retrieval...well, it's not CBT.

Amnon Shoenfeld

Yesterday morning on my way to the office, I bicycled past a man who was shouting to someone from the sidewalk. "MA MEENY MA MOSEY!" he yelled, repeatedly, spittle flying. His eyes were fixed somewhere in the middle distance, his face was red with rage, and the object of his anger was invisible to me.

Depending on who you are, and the time of day, this is the kind of sight--after Shannon Harps--that usually reminds you that there's a good reason to walk a block out of your way. Stretch the legs.

I have felt that I've been seeing more and more homeless, mentally ill people in the grip of visible psychosis since the recession started, and I called Amnon Shoenfeld, director of the King County Mental Health, Chemical Abuse and Dependency Services Division, to see if this was purely anecdotal or not.

Shoenfeld has been director for the past seven years, and with the County in various capacities for 30. He earned his MSW from the University of Washington, and went to work for King County as a crisis outreach and involuntary commitment specialist in 1979.

There are about 27,000 people who rely (voluntarily or not) on King County's mental health services, and another 12,000 who are involved in substance abuse services. This number hasn't varied much recently, Shoenfeld said, but recent budget cuts at the state level have reduced funding by $7 million for mental health, and $3 million for substance abuse.

Funding cuts are about to worsen: Governor Gregoire has just released a doomsday balanced budget that would eliminate the Basic Health Plan and GAU (assistance for people unemployable because of mental or physical disabilities), slash financial aid for college students, and suspend "all-day" kindergarten and support for poorer school districts.

The Seattle Times notes that, "Most of the state budget is off-limits to cuts because it's either protected by the state constitution (such as funding for basic education) or by other requirements (such as the state's share of Medicaid, a federal-state insurance program for the poor.)"

"If I could say anything right now, I'd just say: Please don't cut us any more," Shoenfeld said near the end of our conversation.

I had asked him, looking for a bright spot, if extra funding was somehow found, where he would like it to go. But Shoenfeld, beleaguered, thinking of his case managers with up to 70 clients, couldn't go there at first.

Despite the fact that much of the mental health and substance abuse "bill" is associated with Medicaid, with the federal government footing as much as 60 percent, the state is perversely focused on what it is permitted to cut, rather than the overall cost-effectiveness  of combined federal and state dollars.

"We had to cut back on outreach to kids--mainly street kids--who are abusing substances." As in so many cases, prevention is the cheapest option, Shoenfeld explained, but it seems less critical to the budget-cutting eye.

"We've had to cut back on the number of people who can get into outpatient treatment, both adults and kids. In King County, we have to use all our 'non-Medicaid dollars' to cover crisis services and involuntary commitment services, our evaluation-and-treatment programs, our residential programs," said Shoenfeld.

Now he's expecting proposed cuts of over $1 million in those core crisis services, which for the general public, is related to the sense of insecurity you feel at noticing more people ranting and raving, and behaving unpredictably.... (more)