Suicides of Soldiers Reach High of Nearly Three Decades
from The New York Times
Suicides among soldiers in 2008 rose for the fourth year in a row, reaching the highest level in nearly three decades. At least 128 soldiers killed themselves last year, and the Army suicide rate surpassed that for civilians for the first time since the Vietnam War, according to Army statistics. The suicide count, which includes soldiers in the Army Reserve and the National Guard, is expected to grow; 15 deaths are still being investigated, and the vast majority of them are expected to be ruled suicides, Army officials said. More

Time to Move On....Congratulations Governor Quinn
from NASW IL
It finally ended on Thursday afternoon with the unanimous impeachment vote of Governor Rod Blagojevich by the Illinois Senate (59-0). And it's time to move on. And in case you haven't had enough of the former Governor, you can watch him on David Letterman's show tonight. Chapter President Kathy Wehrmann and I sent new Governor Pat Quinn a letter of congratulations late last week, offering our association's support in putting the state back on the right track. More

After Layoffs, There's Survivor's Guilt
from Time magazine
If your company has just gone through layoffs and you didn't lose your job, you might feel relieved. Or you might feel so horrible you almost wish you didn't work there anymore, either. The terms psychologists toss around to describe these feelings include survivor's guilt (why him and not me?), survivor's envy (thinking you might be better off gone, too) and emotional contagion (the tendency to pick up your laid-off colleagues' feelings of gloom and desperation). More

Mental Health Activists Try to Keep Four Chicago Centers Open
from The Chicago Tribune
Faced with the impending closing of four of Chicago's 12 mental health centers, an advisory board prodded the city's public health commissioner Monday and spoke of pressuring Mayor Richard Daley to create a separate mental health department in the hopes of avoiding further cutbacks. Terry Mason met with the Community Mental Health Board of Chicago and mental health activists for two hours, explaining that the centers were being closed and what was left of their staffs merged with remaining centers because of a $1.2 million cut in state funding. More

The Epidemic That Wasn’t
from The New York Times
When the use of crack cocaine became a nationwide epidemic in the 1980s and ’90s, there were widespread fears that prenatal exposure to the drug would produce a generation of severely damaged children. Newspapers carried headlines like "Cocaine: A Vicious Assault on a Child," "Crack’s Toll Among Babies: A Joyless View" and "Studies: Future Bleak for Crack Babies." But now researchers are systematically following children who were exposed to cocaine before birth, and their findings suggest that the encouraging stories. More

Many Older Youths in State Custody Opt Out — and End Up in Trouble
from St. Louis Post-Dispatch
When he was 16, Jason Hunter was given something most of his fellow foster kids at Evangelical Children's Home in Normandy only dreamed of: someone eager to adopt him and help him into adulthood and beyond. But Hunter, now a junior in college with the partial e-mail address "jasonissuccess," turned her down. Not because he didn't want a home — he had spent years separated from his siblings, while in foster care because his mother was addicted to drugs. More

Keeping Track of Loved Ones
from The Chicago Tribune
When Marie Bloomquist wandered away from home one winter morning, footprints in the snow were the only way to track her. The fading clues indicated the direction taken by the 82-year-old Alzheimer's patient, but little else. Bloomquist was found two hours later in a grocery store near her home in the northwest suburbs, but the harrowing incident left her family with a sense of foreboding. More

Attention, Shopaholics: Your Weakness May Be a Proper Disease
from The New York Times
First there was John A. Thain’s $87,000 rug. Then there was Citigroup’s planned $50 million corporate jet…Ill-advised shopping has certainly turned up recently in the news, and yet the issue also forms the core of a much more contentious and continuing debate. As spenders spend while the economy plummets, the psychiatric world is trying to decide whether compulsive buying should actually be considered a disease. More

Genetic Link Found Between Sleep Disorders and Depression in Young Children
from Science Daily
A new study in the journal Sleep was the first to use twin data to examine the longitudinal link between sleep problems and depression. Results of this study demonstrate that sleep problems predict later depression; the converse association was not found. These findings are consistent with the theory that early treatment of sleep problems may protect children from the development of depression. More

Upcoming Events Networking 101-Return to Basics for Social Workers (2/5/09) LSW/LCSW Review Course (Chicago: 2/13/09)