The availability of psychiatric care took another hit Friday as Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles announced it is phasing out inpatient and outpatient care for the mentally ill. About 1,800 patients depend on Cedars-Sinai for outpatient counseling and medications. In addition, 51 acute-care beds will be lost.

At the bottom of the move is, as usual, finances. Cedars-Sinai says it will make $1.5 million in grants to local agencies to "ease the transition," but it won't ease anything for patients who will have a harder time finding treatment as funding keeps being cut to those same agencies, and they keep having to cut staff.

I received the following news release from Andy Behrman regarding a planned protest:

On Monday, February 13th, the National Alliance on Mental Illness/Los Angeles will gather to protest their outrage at Cedars-Sinai's decision to shut down both its in-patient and out-patient psychiatric care facilities. This will eliminate fifty-one beds that are critical to the community at a time when both city and county wide services are shrinking.

The purpose of OCCUPY CEDARS is not only Read More...

As I first reported in August, 2010, almost 3/4 of patients who were given intravenous ketamine in a small study had rapid relief from their treatment-resistant depression - the median time was just 40 minutes. This was a very small study, with 17 patients who received ketamine and 16 receiving placebo. But now formal clinical trials are being conducted to see whether ketamine, best known as the club drug "Special K," is safe and effective enough for use as an antidepressant.

However, it's important to know that:

• The average duration of relief was only a week, and

• Ketamine can have some strong psychological side effects.

In spite of the small group of patients in the original study, the results were strong enough to make headlines: 71% of those receiving ketamine had relief from depression, and only 1 in 16 of those receiving the placebo reported improvement. One in each group developed manic symptoms. Dissociative symptoms were the most common side effect and did not continue.

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Schizoaffective disorder is one of the least understood mental illnesses. Authorities differ on the description of the illness, and to make matters worse, the European and American definitions are quite a bit different.

In the US, patients with schizoaffective disorder have symptoms of both schizophrenia and bipolar disorder - but there is a lot more to it. Misdiagnosis is common, but fortunately, even when the condition isn't properly diagnosed, treatment may still be effective.

Read the best available information, what the problems in diagnosis are, and why treatment doesn't depend on the right diagnosis:

What Is Schizoaffective Disorder?.

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On our Main Forum, Drop-In Jane writes: "I was wondering, are any of you highly sensitive to noise? I'm moving, and part of the reason is that the walls here are paper-thin. I have a noisy neighbor who likes to have loud drinking parties until 4:00AM on the weekend.

"I'm too scared he'll 'Pacific Heights' me (retaliate) to call the cops. Seriously, i can hear them cough, sneeze and say the F-word over there. They holler when there's a touchdown, as well. I moved my bed into the living room just to get away from him. It's helped a lot for sleeping.

"I've been diagnosed with Chronic Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, so my sensitivity might come from that. I'm also bothered by noise on the bus, construction, alarms, loud music that i don't like and even raised voices. ...

"Going Bananas Because of Noise,

"Drop-In Jane."