Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: Objective: to describe mania and ADHD, mania OR ADHD, and ADHD with mood symptoms.
Method: Literature review and case description
Results: Rates of ADHD/externalizing disorder declines with increasing age of onset of bipolar disorder but manic symptoms (mood lability) appears to be a stable part of the clinical picture of ADHD and conditions in which inattention and hyperactivity occur in many children.
Conclusion: Whichever way these symptom complexes interact requires treatment. The difference may be in the type of treatment and prognosis.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: This paper argues that a culture of psychiatry has constructed a new subject of health, who needs to continually self-scrutinize for mood and behavioral flaws. A concise history of health policy and related business health marketing activities is provided to establish the dominant depression discourse now circulating in American culture. This discourse contends that most Americans possess distresses that can be termed “symptoms“ which distinguish them as “at risk” of major depression and other mental disorders. This new cultural epistemology has created a ready population for on-line health information and self-help technologies, serving primarily, a new middle class population of mental health subjects. The paper reveals a common logic among broad spectrum discourses of health policy, advocacy groups and a broadening recovery industry. The paper details how some industry technologies, ranging from consumer health sites to cybertherapy, target a middle class niche markets of consumers, constructing them as needing

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: Misperceptions that persons with schizophrenia are violent or dangerous lie at the heart of stigmatizations of the disease. For instance, numerous studies have found that physicians, police officers, and the general public overestimate the risk of aggression in patients with schizophrenia more often than in other patient groups. My project tells the story of how these modern-day American conceptualizations of schizophrenic patients as violent emerged during the civil-rights era of the 1950s-1970s in response to a larger set of conversations about race. I integrate institutional, professional, and cultural discourses in order to trace shifts in U.S. popular and medical understandings of schizophrenia from a disease of white docility to one of “Negro” hostility, and from a disease that was nurtured to one that was feared. The first and longest section of the paper tracks the medcalization of race and schizophrenia within a particular institution, the Ionia Hospital for the Criminally Insane. Located in a largely white area of rural Michigan, Ionia was the receiving hospital for prisoners deemed mentally ill by the courts and penal institutions throughout the state. I access an extensive archive of medical records and administrative documents to show that, starting in the 1950s, schizophrenia became a diagnostic term disproportionately applied to the hospital’s growing population of African American men for reasons having as much to do with perceived threats of violence as with criteria for mental illness. The paper’s second section contextualizes the Ionia case histories within shifting psychiatric definitions of schizophrenia, as read through an extensive analysis of published case studies and classification systems. Of particular interest are the ways in which published case studies of the 1960s and 1970s explicitly connected the clinical presentations of African American men with the politics of the civil rights movement in ways that, in its worst moments, treated aspirations for liberation and civil rights as symptoms of mental illness. Finally, the third section reads these shifts in psychiatric nosology within changing American cultural concerns about black masculinity. I use media representations, films, music, protest memoirs, and literary texts to explore ways in which civil-rights era debates about the role of violence in promoting social change mapped onto descriptions of schizophrenia as a violent disease. I also show how proponents of Black Power appropriated psychiatric language to dramatize a response to the “insanity” of racism through militant resistance.

Triangulating the historical connections between institutional forces, psychiatric practices, and civil-rights politics ultimately helps me grapple with some of the seemingly naturalized characteristics of present-day schizophrenia discourse—characteristics that often appear denatured of their explicit connections to race. These include cultural tropes of angry, homeless mentally ill persons or findings demonstrating that persons with schizophrenia reside in prisons far more often than in psychiatric care facilities.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: Postpartum depression can lead to a host of serious problems for both mother and child. There are significant barriers to communicating about postpartum depression, experienced by women and physicians, which contribute to the potentially fatal risks associated with the condition. Generally, these challenges relate to generating awareness about and understanding of postpartum depression. This paper locates existing literature and identifies gaps in knowledge about postpartum depression and identifies barriers to physician-patient discourse about the condition.

Publication Type: CLTA Paper
Abstract: This paper presents the efficacy of intensive error correction with a case study approach by adopting data from multiple recordings, examining the extent to which students are aware of their errors of tones and pronunciations, and enhancing their ability of self correction and evaluation. Pedagogical applications on instruction are provided.