News: For-profit Chicago nursing home threat to mentally ill
Physical abuse, over-medication, inappropriate patient population, and neglectful care to 300 mentally ill patients led the federal government to halt Medicaid funding from a for-profit nursing home. The courts, and the Department of Health and Human Services agree that the residents of Somerset Place in Chicago have been ill served by the partially family-owned company. . .
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News: Over-use of psychotropic drugs in Chicago nursing homes

Wrongful use of anti-psychotic drugs to quiet annoying patients led to 12 deaths and many accidents in Chicago's nursing homes in recent years, according to an article in a series running in the Chicago Tribune. Calling the series "Compromised Care," the paper is exposing the deplorable services, criminal acts, and dysfunctional monitoring of programs and safety of Illinois nursing home residents. . .
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Consider This: Highway to wellness
. . .includes mental health
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News: Reactions to Biederman, Goodwin, The Infinite Mind
Reactions to news about psychiatrists who failed to disclose their working relationships with drug companies appeared over the weekend. On the Media aired a segment discussing the relationship between producers of The Infinite Mind and Dr. Fred Goodwin. Producer Bill Lichtenstein replied to the show in an email. Lichtenstein spoke to The Injury Board which posted documents including a copy of Goodwin's contract. "Expert or Shill?" read the New York Times headline on Sunday's editorial page. In a very brief...
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News: NIH holds up Emory grant
The National Institutes of Health (NIH) has frozen payments to Emory University as part of an investigation into conflicts of interest of Dr. Charles Nemeroff. Nemeroff, an expert on depression, stepped down last week as chairman of the psychiatry department. He is charged with failure to disclose $1.2 million he received from drug companies while engaged in research, a violation of NIH and Emory's own academic procedures. The Atlantic Journal Constitution broke the story after receiving a memo from...
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News: Update North Carolina: hospital closes ward following death
North Carolina officials announced they have closed the adult psychiatric ward and fired 16 people after last week's disclosure that a 50-year old patient, whom the staff ignored for 22 hours, died in April....
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News: Video captures death and staff neglect
The North Carolina News & Observer reports a 50-year old psychiatric patient died at Cherry Hill Hospital after 22 hours in a chair in a busy room, where he choked on medicine while nurses played cards and talked on the phone. He was neglected through four shifts, and ate nothing the day of his death. Also at Cherry Hill, and also recorded on video, came reports earlier this month of an incident in which a psychiatrist scuffled and struck a...
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News: Georgia plagiarizes mental health report
The blue-ribbon panel studying Georgia's mental health delivery, which released its report just days after receiving a blistering letter from the Civil Rights Division of the Department of Justice, plagiarized a 2004 "new vision" from Michigan. The The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, which prints side-by-side examples, writes: The pilfered sections of the report diminish eight months of work by the commission, suggesting a study process that lacked sufficient rigor. Even much of what appears to be original work contains the vaguest...
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