Mental health emergencies, the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline, mobile crisis teams, dual diagnosis, trauma and PTSD — care for the moments when waiting isn’t an option.
Wendell, a fifty-two-year-old high school principal in Cleveland, had been in psychiatric care for three years when his second psychiatrist asked him a question the first never had: how do you sleep? Wendell laughed. He slept the way everybody his age slept, he said, badly, and he had been told for as long as he … Read more
Wendell, a fifty-two-year-old high school principal in Cleveland, had been in psychiatric care for three years when his second psychiatrist asked him a question the first never had: how do you sleep? Wendell laughed. He slept the way everybody his age slept, he said, badly, and he had been told for as long as he … Read more
Daniel arrived at a Nashville hospital with a blood alcohol concentration of 0.42, a tremor that rattled the gurney rails, and a CIWA-Ar score climbing past twenty within an hour of admission. He was forty-six, a contractor who had been drinking around a fifth of vodka a day for nine years, and he had been … Read more
Daniel arrived at a Nashville hospital with a blood alcohol concentration of 0.42, a tremor that rattled the gurney rails, and a CIWA-Ar score climbing past twenty within an hour of admission. He was forty-six, a contractor who had been drinking around a fifth of vodka a day for nine years, and he had been … Read more
Trevor, a 34-year-old software engineer in Sacramento, had been on bupropion for treatment-resistant depression for nine months when he was found unresponsive at his desk by a coworker who initially thought he was sleeping. The convulsions started while paramedics were loading him into the ambulance and continued through the emergency department triage area, prompting immediate … Read more
Marcus, a 64-year-old retired postal worker in Tucson, had been taking haloperidol for paranoid schizophrenia for nearly two decades when his daughter noticed something strange during a Sunday dinner. His tongue darted in and out of his mouth between bites, his lips puckered and smacked involuntarily, and his fingers played invisible piano scales on the … Read more
Marcus, a 64-year-old retired postal worker in Tucson, had been taking haloperidol for paranoid schizophrenia for nearly two decades when his daughter noticed something strange during a Sunday dinner. His tongue darted in and out of his mouth between bites, his lips puckered and smacked involuntarily, and his fingers played invisible piano scales on the … Read more
Hannah, a 22-year-old graduate student in Boston, started her first semester of a neuroscience PhD program in good health and ended it on a locked psychiatric ward, then a neurology floor, then a neurocritical care unit, with a diagnosis no one in her family had ever heard of. The first symptoms were flu-like and unremarkable: … Read more
Hannah, a 22-year-old graduate student in Boston, started her first semester of a neuroscience PhD program in good health and ended it on a locked psychiatric ward, then a neurology floor, then a neurocritical care unit, with a diagnosis no one in her family had ever heard of. The first symptoms were flu-like and unremarkable: … Read more
Diego, a 41-year-old construction supervisor in Albuquerque, was started on a six-week taper of high-dose prednisone for severe poison oak dermatitis after a hiking trip. By the second week he was sleeping three hours a night, talking faster than his wife had ever heard, planning to refinance the house to fund a side business in … Read more