mental health awareness

More than 200 advocates and stakeholders were at the Statehouse in Montpelier, Vermont for the 10th annual Mental Health Advocacy Day this week.

A former member of Congress is drawing attention to America’s mental health issues. In today’s Congressional Corner, one-time Rhode Island Democratic Congressman Patrick Kennedy speaks with WAMC’s Ian Pickus.

Dr. Jay Carruthers is Director of the Suicide Prevention Center of New York At New York State Office of Mental Health and Assistant Professor in the Department of Psychiatry at Albany Medical Center. September is Suicide Prevention Month, so we wanted to discuss this enormous public health problem and learn how New York State’s Office of Mental Health is responding.

Allen Ginsberg’s 1956 poem “Howl” opens with one of the most resonant phrases in modern poetry: “I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness.” Thirty years later, Ginsberg entrusted a Columbia University medical student with materials not shared with anyone else, including psychiatric records that documented how he and his mother, Naomi Ginsberg, struggled with mental illness.In "Best Minds," psychiatrist, researcher, and scholar Stevan M. Weine, M.D., who was that medical student, examines how Allen Ginsberg took his visions and psychiatric hospitalization, his mother’s devastating illness, confinement, and lobotomy, and the social upheavals of the postwar world and imaginatively transformed them.

Law enforcement officers in western Massachusetts recently completed a week of crisis intervention training. The course focused on dealing with people…

May is nationally recognized as Mental Health Awareness Month, and mental health advocates in the Berkshires are becoming involved to educate the public…