Health Risks with MySpace

The Internet plays a major role in the lives of adolescents, and approximately half of them use online social networking Web sites such as MySpace.
“One of the concerns about teenagers using social networking Web sites is the worry about them attracting unwanted attention,” said Dr. Megan Moreno, assistant professor of pediatric and adolescent medicine at [...]

Dealing with Mental Illness in a Rural Area

MADISON COUNTY, Ga.– The depression she’s talking about is deeper than sadness, said Amanda Bass. “It’s hopelessness, helplessness,” she said. “It’s faithlessness. It’s not believing that you’ll ever get better.” Bass, 32, has bipolar disorder, a mental illness characterized by mood swings, ranging anywhere from severe depression to mania. Bass remembers struggling with the disorder [...]

The Sex Education Debate Continues

“My birth control didn’t work,” a teenage girl facing her second pregnancy recently told Melanie Berryman, who runs the teen parent support group at a rural northeastern Georgia county high school.
This is the kind of thing that Berryman hears often and illustrates how access to birth control cannot successfully take the place of comprehensive sex [...]

Cultural Competency and Mental Health

James Walker, a project manager at a public relations firm from Fairfax, Va., remembers many in his family echoing the same sentiment.  “You know how so and so is. Don’t pay them any mind. They’re just a little off.”
“In my family,” says Walker, who is black, “depression is not considered a medical condition. It’s not [...]

Covering Mental Health Issues in the Black Community

“Mental health is very much stigmatized in the black community,” said Dr. Annelle Primm, a board certified psychiatrist and director of the Office of Minority and National Affairs at the American Psychiatric Association, during the mental health panel of the National Association of Black Journalists health disparities conference.
African-Americans experience greater disparities when it comes [...]

I Hear You, Crazy Old Man

Thanksgiving 2008.
“We need a socialist revolution!” declared my dad with all the fervor of a scholar who has spent the majority of his adult life studying the texts of Marx and Lenin, the theories of capitalism and imperialism, and traveling to Russia and Cuba when Americans weren’t supposed to travel to Russia or Cuba.
“Dad, [...]