RALEIGH — After working for nearly a decade to close Dorothea Dix Hospital, state mental health administrators now intend to keep a sizable number of staff and patients at the aging Raleigh facility for years. Read the rest of this entry

GOLDSBORO — A former employee of a state mental hospital in Goldsboro pleaded guilty this week to sexually battering a patient. Read the rest of this entry

Prosecutors and defense attorneys agreed on one thing regarding Alvaro Castillo, the 22-year-old man who will serve a life term for the murder of his father and other crimes: he is mentally ill, and seriously so. Castillo’s story played out in dramatic fashion in a Hillsborough courtroom last week, but in the end, the jury seemed to reach the inevitable verdict in finding him guilty. Read the rest of this entry

Congestive heart failure is what caused the death of a 75-year-old man who died en route to the hospital in June after sheriff’s deputies removed him from his home. Read the rest of this entry

With 810 beds at its ever-expanding Raleigh campus and at four other locations, and an annual budget of more than $800 million, it’s easily the county’s biggest health organization and, its leadership argues, the hardest-working. Read the rest of this entry

A Raleigh company that provides human-resources benefits to other businesses expects to add 50 employees by the end of this year and another 50 or so next year. About one-third of the people the company plans to hire would be mental-health professionals, while another third would be legal and financial advisers. Read the rest of this entry

The board that oversees mental health delivery in mountain counties heard from U.S. Rep. Heath Shuler on Tuesday about what the proposed health care overhaul would do to mental health services. The only mental health aspect of the HR 3200, the primary health care reform bill in the House, is parity, Shuler said. This requires insurance plans to offer the same coverage for mental health coverage as physical health coverage. Read the rest of this entry

State budget cuts to the Division of Mental Health, Developmental Disabilities and Substance Abuse totaling $155 million will result in job losses for 75 employees at mental hospitals and homes for the developmentally disabled in North Carolina. Read the rest of this entry

Tuesday, August 25, 2009
Nash Health Care campus medical facilities will continue to be able to accept Medicare after submitting a “corrective plan of action” to address issues related to the recent death of a patient at the system’s psychiatric facility. Read the rest of this entry

Determining who has responsibility for mental-health patients in local emergency rooms has gotten the attention of more than law-enforcement and health-care providers. Yesterday’s 2½-hour meeting also attracted three local legislators who are concerned about the inefficiencies in the current system. Read the rest of this entry

SHELBY — A new 16-bed detox facility set just blocks away from Cleveland Regional Medical Center is expected to bring 28 new full-time jobs to the area. Read the rest of this entry

GREENSBORO – Mark Horvath sat on an overturned crate, his digital video camera trained on a man sitting in a tent in the woods. Keith Owens, who lives in the tent, is one of about a dozen homeless people camped out near the railroad tracks in this section of downtown Greensboro.

With reform in health care dominating conversations across Haywood County and the nation, there is one area receiving little to no attention — addiction treatment. It is a topic that should be included in the debate, says Norman Hoffmann Ph.D., a clinical psychologist who has worked in addiction evaluation programs. Read the rest of this entry

A state mental hospital psychiatrist testified Monday that Demeatrius Montgomery is competent to stand trial for the 2007 murders of two Charlotte-Mecklenburg police officers. Two psychiatrists and a psychologist, testifying for the defense, have said Montgomery likely suffers from paranoid schizophrenia and is incompetent to stand trial because he won’t talk to his lawyers and can’t assist them in his defense. Read the rest of this entry

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ARCHDALE — Students at UNC-Chapel Hill return to class today grieving the loss of a fellow student who was shot and killed early Sunday by an Archdale police officer. Read the rest of this entry

A scheme to steal more than $300,000 intended for residents of some Winston-Salem group homes is about as low as it goes, especially in a state with a poorly managed and underfunded mental-health-care system. Group-home operators should double their efforts to guard against such crimes. Read the rest of this entry

Winston-Salem police officers can stun people with Tasers on their torsos and legs when those people are fighting or resisting them, according to a policy released last week. Officers should use caution “to avoid firing probes to a subject’s head, neck and genital areas,” the policy says. Read the rest of this entry

Yes, the stock market has risen nicely this summer, regaining some of the losses from last fall and winter. But those gains are nothing compared to the performance of Targacept, which has spiked more than 500 percent in last six weeks — from $2.37 a share to $13 and above.

The Winston-Salem drug discovery company is slowly being discovered by a core group of investors on Wall Street. And it appears likely, though by no means assured, that more will be jumping on the bandwagon in the months ahead. And there’s a good reason why. Read the rest of this entry

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A brand-new state spending cut, accountability at UNC, political influence at the DMV and fixing mental health treatment are up for discussion.

A FEW YEARS BACK, police officers in Memphis, Tenn., faced off with a mentally ill individual with the same results as the recent Jacksonville incident in which an officer shot and killed 30-year-old Sam Jarolim.

At the outset, let this be clear: No one blames the officer in the Jacksonville incident. Jarolim, whose family says he was bipolar, not on his medication and depressed about a break-up with a girlfriend, was apparently determined to die. The officer who shot him did so to defend both police and the public.

The rightness or wrongness of the shooting is not the only concern here. No, this is about how America handles mental illness. Read the rest of this entry

They’ll get their chance next week when Shuler meets with Western Highlands board members. “It was at my request,” Henderson County Manager Steve Wyatt said. “At the last meeting, I asked that we extend an invitation to Shuler and (Rep. Patrick) McHenry.” Read the rest of this entry

CARRBORO — A jury is supposed to decide guilt, not feel it. But the jurors whose first-degree murder verdict on Friday meant Alvaro Castillo would spend the rest of his life in prison longed for other options, the jury foreman said in an interview Saturday. The six men and six women felt sorry for the mentally ill defendant who had lived a hardscrabble 22 years, said Thomas Boyer, the foreman. Read the rest of this entry

Correlations between food insecurity and mental health and obesity in school-aged children.

When almost a quarter of North Carolina’s youngest children aren’t eating a balanced diet, what does that mean for their health as they grow? Doctors, dieticians and experts in childhood development say the effects of malnutrition show up in a variety of ways, including chronic health woes and problems with learning in school

The family of a man shot dead by Jacksonville police last week say a lack of affordable area mental health assistance contributed to his death. “My brother needed help with his addictions,” Francine Wood, the sister of Samuel Jarolim, told The Daily News on Thursday. “But we didn’t have $50,000 to get him into a good program.” Read the rest of this entry