Maryanne Godboldo’s daughter released as parents, state wrangle over her medical care

Maryanne Godboldo’s supporters will gather today for a reunion party at Hartford Memorial Baptist Church in Detroit.

They’re celebrating the fact that Godboldo’s 13-year-old daughter — at the center of a struggle between her parents and the state over her medical care — was released Friday from a medical facility in Northville into her aunt’s care.

Godboldo, who has garnered significant community support, says she has the right to determine her daughter’s care and had been weaning her off a prescribed psychotropic drug in favor of holistic treatments.

Antipsychotic Drugs Called Hazardous for the Elderly

Nearly one in seven elderly nursing home residents, nearly all of them with dementia, are given powerful atypical antipsychotic drugs even though the medicines increase the risks of death and are not approved for such treatments, a government audit found. More than half of the antipsychotics paid for by the federal Medicare program in the first half of 2007 were “erroneous,” the audit found, costing the program $116 million for those six months. “Government, taxpayers, nursing home residents as well as their families and caregivers should be outraged and seek solutions,” Daniel R. Levinson, inspector general of the Department of Health and Human Services, wrote in announcing the audit results.

Brooklyn’s Kingsboro Psychiatric Center a ‘violent’ madhouse with deaths linked to paperwork snafus

A Brooklyn mental hospital is a violence-wracked, dangerous place, rife with assaults and at least two deaths linked to paperwork snafus, the Daily News has learned. Federal surveys and court documents paint a disturbing portrait at the state’s problem-plagued Kingsboro Psychiatric Center. “Violence has become a way of life at KPC,” an independent mental health expert wrote in a Kingsboro-commissioned 2009 report after the hospital was sued in federal court.

Three Recent Warnings On Antidepressants; Latest Is Stroke Risk

As we all know, three of anything makes a trend in journalism, and my trend alarm has just gone off concerning scary news about antidepressants. First, there was this review three weeks ago finding a “modest link” between antidepressants and cancer — though not in studies funded by the drug companies.

Then, author and former Globe staffer Alison Bass reported a week ago on her blog here that a researcher has found that serious flaws tended to skew the biggest study ever of antidepressants toward making the drugs appear more effective than they really are.

And now, Dr. Adam C. Urato, assistant professor of medicine at Tufts, has just sent over the latest: a paper in the current American Journal of Psychiatry that suggests that antidepressants increase the risk of stroke.