Recent Stories with tag schizophrenia

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)

City Council President Richard Conlin is confident he did the right thing. Also, here is a picture of a Babydoll sheep.

It's probably no surprise to learn, as Publicola reports, that a supermajority of the City Council thinks having a mayor is "more of a guideline." (Possibly related: It's Turn In Your Old Drugs Day.)

While you're over there, read the Council's Tim Burgess on why he was all, "Yeah, send Bishop Conlin!" which crystallizes the kind of project-capture thinking that places going forward with the tunnel above respecting the city's charter. Quote of the week goes to Mike O'Brien, who notes that, "Only in Seattle would we have a coup over who signs an environmental-impact statement."

Late Friday, regulators seized Arlington's North County Bank, and sold it to Whidbey Island Bank; bad development and construction loans ended up costing the FDIC (and you and me and everyone we know) almost $73 million dollars, about 25 percent of the bank's total value.

In the latest on the multiple fatal shootings in West Seattle, the 60-year-old grandmother is said to have had a history of mental illness, and--more troublingly--she may have been taking medication erratically. Many people are not aware that the kinds of drugs used now to treat depression and schizophrenia can have horrendous side-effects if suddenly discontinued.... (more)