Woman gets 14 years in fatal wreck Driving while high on the drug GHB, she slammed into a car driven by a 54-year-old Dade City woman and killed her. By CHASE SQUIRES, Times Staff Writer © St. Petersburg Times published January 17, 2003 -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- DADE CITY -- Shanna Jane West -- wisp thin, blond and young -- wiped the ink from fingers tipped in red nail polish and extended her hands Thursday morning as a bailiff snapped cuffs on her wrists. Her fingerprints recorded, she glanced over her shoulder, mouthed a goodbye to her family and walked from the courtroom on her way to serve a 14-year prison sentence. West, 23, was driving to a friend's house Nov. 21, 2000, after being released from a Hillsborough County jail after a drunken driving arrest. Along the way, she got high on the drug GHB and went into a stupor on U.S. 41 in Land O'Lakes. She crossed the center line and slammed into a car driven by 54-year-old Dade City humanitarian Barbara Mercer, killing her. On Oct. 31, West pleaded guilty to manslaughter by culpable negligence. On Thursday, Circuit Judge Wayne Cobb sentenced her to 14 years in prison. Mercer's widower, Lindy, said the stern sentence satisfies his family and sends a message to anyone who would consider driving while impaired. "This loss can't be measured," Mercer told the judge. "There's nothing that can be said that makes this better. . . . I wish I could say something that would make a difference, that would make people quit getting high and driving." Mercer said West's decision to drive high took a mother from his children, took a charity-minded activist from the community and robbed his wife of a chance to enjoy what were supposed to have been the best years of her life. Prosecutor Phil Van Allen read a letter written by Barbara Mercer's brother, Gerald Stevenson. "I personally never will forgive or forget," Stevenson wrote. "We miss Barbara every day of our lives, and we always will." West's attorney, Robert Ford, told Cobb his client was sorry for what happened and said her attitudes have changed since her arrest. He said she had endured a difficult life and had used illegal drugs since she was 10 or 11. After the hearing, West's family declined to comment. West was composed throughout the 30-minute sentencing. She showed no emotion and opted not to publicly apologize or ask the judge for leniency. Ford said West felt an apology would sound self-serving and would do no good. "It's not going to help them, it's not going to help her," Ford said. "There's nothing else she can say." When Cobb pronounced the sentence and asked if West had any questions, she asked, "Is there going to be any rehabilitation included, or is it just going to be a flat 14 years?" Cobb told her she could ask for rehabilitation while in prison. "Okay," she said. "I have no questions." As bailiff Jim Dome fingerprinted her, she looked over her shoulder at her family a couple of times but did not appear distraught. She put out her hands, and Dome snapped the cuffs on her wrists. East Pasco Habitat for Humanity president Niki Trapnell, a close friend of Barbara Mercer, said it was ironic that the person who would have been most likely to reach out to West would have been Barbara Mercer. "If she were here," Trapnell said, "She would have tried to help that girl." -- Chase Squires covers east Pasco courts. He can be reached at (352) 521-5757, ext. 27 or toll-free 1-800-333-7505, ext. 6108, then 27. His e-mail address is squires@sptimes.com . . |
Junked art work raises questions of value Series: 2B St. Petersburg Times; St. Petersburg, Fla.; Jan 18, 2003; LENNIE BENNETT; Abstract: The culture wars have come to St. Petersburg. In a pale re- enactment of a very public controversy played out in New York City between 1981 and 1989 over a sculpture by artist Richard Serra, Temple Beth-El and local sculptor Bradley Arthur are locked in combat over the destruction of The Wave/Quantum Fluctuation, a large work that sat outside the temple for more than 12 years. Serra installed a postmodern curve of raw steel, 120 feet long and 12 feet high, titled Tilted Arc that cut the plaza space in half, causing inconvenience and annoyance to the hundreds of workers who had to walk around it every day. After much public debate, the GSA decided to remove it. Serra sued the GSA and lost, and the sculpture was carved into three pieces and carted to a scrap metal yard. There are fundamental differences between the Richard Serra-GSA contentions and those of Arthur vs. Temple. Arthur's work, though it sat in a quasi-public space on private property, was not public art, nor was it a commissioned work owned by the Temple. And Arthur is not an artist of Serra's caliber. Full Text: Copyright Times Publishing Co. Jan 18, 2003 The culture wars have come to St. Petersburg. In a pale re- enactment of a very public controversy played out in New York City between 1981 and 1989 over a sculpture by artist Richard Serra, Temple Beth-El and local sculptor Bradley Arthur are locked in combat over the destruction of The Wave/Quantum Fluctuation, a large work that sat outside the temple for more than 12 years. The terms of their agreement ("long-term loan" or "abandoned property," depending on who describes it) and events culminating in the sculpture's demise are as opaque as a piece of sheet metal. Arthur is suing the temple for compensation, using for legal precedent the Visual Artists Rights Act passed in 1991, largely the result of the Serra imbroglio. The famous and famously arrogant Serra, known for his massive, site-specific "land works," had been commissioned by the U.S. General Services Administration to create a piece of public art for Federal Plaza in New York City. Serra installed a postmodern curve of raw steel, 120 feet long and 12 feet high, titled Tilted Arc that cut the plaza space in half, causing inconvenience and annoyance to the hundreds of workers who had to walk around it every day. After much public debate, the GSA decided to remove it. Serra sued the GSA and lost, and the sculpture was carved into three pieces and carted to a scrap metal yard. The events sparked a firestorm of debate about public art that still burns and unleashed questions about the definition of art that have led to deeper probings into censorship issues and First Amendment rights. There are fundamental differences between the Richard Serra-GSA contentions and those of Arthur vs. Temple. Arthur's work, though it sat in a quasi-public space on private property, was not public art, nor was it a commissioned work owned by the Temple. And Arthur is not an artist of Serra's caliber. But the merits of the art and legal ownership are not the issues. Moral ownership is. The Visual Artists Rights Act simply put a legal imprimatur on a commonly held belief: You don't destroy art. Then again, art is destroyed all the time. Artists quietly burn or bury work they consider inferior. And great-grandchildren routinely toss old landscapes moldering in granny's attic. British megacollector Richard Saatchi arrived home one day last year to find that a very valuable sculpture made of frozen blood that he kept in the freezer had melted down during a kitchen renovation. Should these destroyers of art be brought to justice? No, not from a common sense or legal standpoint. The Visual Artists Rights Act was specific in its protections, which are meant mainly to safeguard artists' work in the public arena, and the act has many loopholes and exclusions. The act requires a "diligent, good faith" and documented effort on the part of a building owner who wants to remove an artwork, and the owner has the right to do so if those requirements under the law have been satisfied. The temple says it asked Arthur to remove the work; Arthur said he never heard from the temple. Resolving that dispute is up to the courts. What's really a corker is that the alleged agent of destruction is Temple Beth-El. The temple's congregation is considered a group of sophisticated, sensitive people, many of them community leaders, who started and have fostered for 30 years one of the area's finest art shows, Festival Beth-El, coming up Jan. 25-27. Most outdoor art is destroyed more insidiously. Without the kings, czars, doges and emperors who commissioned and maintained public art for centuries in other parts of the world, public art in the United States is created and placed mostly through a process decided by committees and funded by corporations or governments at local, state and national levels. Communities glow with civic pride when new public art is unveiled, a measure of status and a yardstick of cultural awareness. Maintaining the art, however, often doesn't get much attention. Outdoor art is always in the process of deterioration. Officials in Rome have worked for decades to retard the corrosive effects of pollution and the elements on the city's marble fountains and statues. But what about public art with less illustrious provenance? When art changes because of elemental forces, becoming what some would call an "eyesore," is it no longer art? Should it be removed? When tastes and mores change, and the public insists on adding fig leaves or veils to cover nudity, or repainting art a different color than the artist selected, is it still art as conceived by the artist? When the land on which a work sits, and for which it was designed, is needed for other purposes and the art is moved, is it the same work of art? The answers are easy when the work in question is a marble statue by Michelangelo, harder when it's an (allegedly) rusting metal abstraction of questionable merit. We Americans have a spotty record in our treatment of art that gets in our way, physically, aesthetically or morally. Laws can go only so far in deciding how we resolve the great divide of opinion over what counts as art, who owns it and what that ownership entails. [Illustration] Caption: Bradley Arthur's sculpture, The Wave / Quantum Fluctuation; Photo: PHOTO, SPECIAL TO THE TIMES |
January 2003-- I lived near Detroit for 20 years and saw someone I knew in the newspaper twice--once my grandfather's store donated to someone seeking something from "Action Line" in the Free Press, and when my 11-year-old brother strangled himself it was in the Pontiac Press.I've been in Tampa 28 years and rarely read a newspaper that doesn't mention someone I've met, or known, and knows me. It makes it more my hometown than my old one was. Here is the end of Shanna's story. |
Shanna did not want to try to weasel out of her punishment for killing a woman. She is very strong a person of character, for all the madness enveloping her. They say manic-depressives have low self-esteem, aren't sure they are real, etc.. That is why they may move about , speaking to no one, on down days. A month ago Shanna woke Bob up in the middle of the night, saying she was scared and could he turn on all the lights and stay up with her? So he did and finally asked her, for she sat on her bed speechlessly for hours, if she was all right now. "Yeah," she said. "You can go back to sleep now, Dad. Thanks." She would come home, open all the windows and sliding doors on both floors, enjoy the breeze, leave again for days with everything open and Bob 50 miles away.He's doing all the carpentry on million-dollar condos being built on Treasure Island's beach of shallow water and gorgeous sunsets. He stays there several days straight as the drive is so far. Shanna was living alone at his house with no phone, and took to biking places and had a lot of different friends come out and get her. She made many of them the day before---she was manic and could not help herself. For example, a new male friend took her to a restaurant near Bob's and was somehow noticed to have a warrent out for his arrest and called on. As police arrested him they called Bob to come get Shanna--not just because they were leaving her stranded at the restaurant, but because she was out of control. Bob arrived to find her yelling "It's 9-11 all over again! The world is ending !" And , in a cop's face, "Serve and protect--that's what youre suposed to do, not this! Serve and protect!" She asked Bob to help get her stuff from The Spring, a shelter for abused women and families. She "thought" she knew where it was. The location is secret from everyone so no men will go there threatening families that left them. So when she gets near and calls them on Bob's cell phone for exact directions, they won't give them. So Bob has to take her to the "cop shop", where one drives her to the Spring for her stuff, and then back to Bob. Bob, who didn't expect to meet cops this day or the one before when they called him from the restaurant, nervously handles all this because there is a warrent out for him for failure to pay Shanna's child support. In just a few weeks he has to collect her stuff after she runs from The Spring, the Salvation Army, and abusive boyfriends. But she can't sit still at Bob's house alone all day, so she keeps taking off. At one point she calls Bob from a payphone and leaves a message for him to rescue her, then calls her mother and it is somehow recorded on Bob's answering machine as she begs her mother to let her come home, she has nowhere to go and is on the street. "Too bad,"her mother says."No way." Of course the mother is rather tired of 11 years of this crap. Shanna 's last trip to her mother's, to get her stuff to move somewhere else she would move out of within hours, the mother's live-in honey was home alone and wouldn't let her in and Shanna pushes past him so he blocks her so she calls police, saying he physically assaulted her.Now she wants to move everything back there again already. Robin's had enough. Bob, my boyfriend, is working 80 hours a week in Treasure Island, a 45 minute drive. He can't call facilities to place her so calls me daily with all the new developements , sometimes so upset he can barely speak. I love him so much and this really hurts me. "You'll never guess what Shanna did now!" He says, incredulous. I remind him she is probably ,as she told police, combating an altered brain chemistry since adolescence and has been crying for help for years. He begs me to find a place that will take her , since her mother won't try and he can't get to a phone all day, putting up doulble-wide baseboards on unairconditioned floors of a Florida condo. I spent two days on the phone calling every agency I can find. I found a place that would accept Shanna who has no insurance and has a double-problem : drugs and mental illness. Some places will take mentally ill but only if they are off drugs; some will help users kick but can't treat them for mental illness. This place is her only hope. Shanna agrees to go in but wants out within a day, calling her mother and Bob to get her to no avail. Her last call on Bob's machine is biting:"I can sign myself out, ha-ha, I'm 23 years old," she says, as if she just found out her age.She does, too, even though they have just diagnosed her as bipolar and put her on meds. She stops the meds, trades for coke and booze. Runs around with a crack head who makes porno films online. When she calls me and hears I am not doing well, she has a nice elderly country-music dressing man drive her over to give me $20. He's nice--and a lot older than her parents. At her age older men with one thing on their minds were my only friends too . You wish they 'd care enuf to put you through college, since they are lawyers and bankers, but they just want a Monica Lewinski relationship. Shanna seems to have exacted a fairer relationship with older men--they seem to really care for her. I'll never forget how she had him drive 80 miles to give me $20. You can't find a truer friend than that and she barely knows me. I think she is boss. I understand completely, and find her delightful. She is a beautiful waif, an imp, lovely from every direction, with a spirited spirituality. She seems to believe you can just walk onto a cloud and into heaven anytime.She says when she gets to prison she will embrace the Bible wholly. (Holy?)She just can't do it til she has to. Too many things to do out here every day, too many people she has not yet met while she is so young and pretty that everyone loves her. She's many men's ideal date. Alone after her mother won't get her, she walks to a McDonalds and asks for a job application and tells the lady she is going to prison for 10 or 20 years in a month. The lady gives her a hamburger, which she scarfs hungrily, then she walks outside where a motorcycle regalia is going by. She's last seen getting on a motorcycle. Next seen 2 days later when she brings her new boyfriend to see Bob's work on Treasure Island. He's a cop in his 40's from Georgia. He wants her to live with him, she announces pleasedly, causing inward frowns in Bob--she's said that 5 times in 2 weeks about 5 different guys who one by one she leaves in a huff. Her fraility , beauty, openess and charm captures them all."That will be gone," all the men say sadly that meet her,"By the time she gets out."You get the idea she does have one foot in heaven , because she is cetainly not living on our plane. She thinks magic can happen and all is about to be swell; beautiful, everyone on earth lucky, love prevailing over evil for good. Then the next day she can't talk and silently makes herself lunch and takes off on her bike, her head covered as if to hide herself, not speaking to Bob at all, as if she cannot intrude in this world, be noticed here. But through it all she hangs onto her courage and her conviction that love rules. She will not ask for mercy. She killed someone and wants to pay.She's a dynamite force, the most rebellious kid he ever met, Bob says. He realizes now that he should have gone to court for custody of her when she was 15 and her mom was letting a man in his 30's live with her in Mom's house. He would have gotten her, and he would not now owe all this child support, which Mom told him verbally he could ignore, since everyone knew Shanna was living with that man nearly as old as Mom , in Mom's home. Only after Shanna has grown up and left mom's home (with mom putting restraining orders on her several times to keep her from returning) does Mom tell the child support court that dad hasn't paid Shanna's support for 6 years. He is immediatey ordered to pay thousands or go to jail. The day after he pays seven of the the thousands the state grabs the rest of the money in his bank account, bouncing 2 mortgage payments, a car payment, credit card payments all to hell."What did I just bargain with them all to make a payment on ?" he demands of his attorney, who charges him $250 for asking, $250 for calling to find out, $250 for getting the answer call back, and $250 for calling Bob and telling him :"You paid to stay out of jail; there was no promise not to go after your holdings right afterwards." So, his going to court with an attorney to ask to make a partial payment on the $13,000 they took his driver's license away for owing,and were about to jail him for, did not save him after all agreed to the partial payment and took it from him.They had every right to sieze his bank account a day later and grab another $3000 for Mom. Mom gets a new inground pool with the first big check from Bob; goes to Can-can with her live-in beau of 8 years with the next one.They never married because it would jeapardize the child support she enjoys getting for them. It's fun for her--she couldn't demand it during the years Shanna was a minor child, because there was that sticky situation of the man in the child's bed. Now she can say she supported the minor child and needs the lout Bob's child support he never paid and the state jumps into high gear for her. If only Bob had gone to Shanna's rescue when she was 15! He'd be getting the child support from Robin instead of vice-versa now. And he would have really supported Shanna. Well, tried-- she was rebellious--- The paper says she was on drugs since age 10. Bob says she was still in their control then. It was when she got to high school, at 13, that she began to hang with seniors and bring guys in after the parents went to bed. My personal viewpoint is that the Mercer woman would be alive if someone had realized this was no normal teen and got Shanna diagnosed at 13 and on meds or hospitalized if they had to. But Mom didn't want to go that road; mental illness made her uncomfortable, as if responsible.She preferred to think Shanna was just mature, fast, and then, bad. So this girl who took a flight into the fanciful at 12 or 13 and never could land on earth again spent years trying to deal with her wild mood swings all by herself, naturally resorting to drugging herself, naturally resulting in a tragic accident killing an innocent driver by age 21. I wish all parents of problem teens would know this story and use their wits to keep other innocent people from dying and their teens from raising cain inadvertantly as a side-effect of wild chemical imbalances in their poor innocent brains. One such teen is making talk circuits now to explain her bipolar illness and how it messed her up and no one recognized it in time. She was accepted into the University of her dreams and flipped out on the train ride there and recalls at one point standing on a table in a bar in Paris saying she would have sex with anyone man enough. Eventually her unusual sex life gets her the attention she needs to get the bipolar diagnosisis and now she is fine on meds and wants to help other teen girls who don't understand what is happening to them, and their families to see the clues and get them help. These girls are victims of chemical imbalances--they need our love and help. To know Shanna is to love her, is to worry about this cold adult world that lets people suffer her plight and then incarcerates them as punishment for having the chemical imbalance they were born with. Shanna will be in there until her 5-year-old son is 19.Perhaps she will reach and touch people in the prison system with her, perhaps this is what God made that angel in waiting to do. I pray for her nightly, she's definitely in the wrong place. This lithe spirit is trying to make sense of a world while her mind is racing at 5000 mph more than ours are. She needs medication, not hatred. Had she got help earlier, she wouldn't have tried to drug herself to still the impulses (as the newspaper article states she told the sheriffs). Please, people, if your cute little girl changes into a lot of trouble and fighting at adolescence, don't shy away from having her checked out for chemical imbalances in her brain. For Shanna, Mrs. Mercer, the migrant family riding with Mrs. Mercer that fateful day, and all your own loved ones and others' loved ones. Shanna hopes her story can save others. (I'd use a psedonym but so many people who know I live with Bob have called me to tell me how much they hate Shanna after reading about her in the paper that I just had to explain it is not her fault. They quote her words to reporters and police , saying "She's got to be the stupidest person I've ever heard of and she deserves prison." I want them to understand this. They just don't understand. |
My other friend in the paper this week: |
I shouldn't comment for 3 reasons: 1. Bradley is my friend 2. The lady author is the one wh did the article months ago on the Mural of Tony Jannus' Landing just restored at great expense. She left Joe Myers' name out of it comepletely so I emailed her to a photo and 1938 article in the newspaper saying that 2 men, George Snow Hill and Joseph D. Myers, did the mural.She called me on the phone saying my website did not work and she'd never heard of Joseph D Myers or his working with Hill on the mural so sorry. So while on the phone with me she called up my web page of the 1938 article, sniffed, hung up and never published any of it as an addendum, as in setting the facts straight.So I already think she is unfair to artists and the integrity of their efforts, hides the existance of co-artists she is well-aware of on famous public art, etc. I dislike her of course. 3. We have stained glass in Temple beth-El. It's very 50's-60's to me and I wondered each timeI showed the photo to an interested party, if the windows were even still there, they are so, to me gaudy. But I have reasons I shoud speak up, too. I know that influential people up north got the U.S> looking at Stained Glass restoration as a great art performable by virtually nobody that doesn't tran under one of these accredit schools with something called The Stained Glass Association of America, which was hoping to be taken for kind of like the AIA in stature, although it was not an industry with licenses and required apprenticeship and schooling. Just hoping to be mistaken for one, and them the standards, or leaders. One of their not so secret tenets was that the European styl of stained glass with representational art was what they existed to diffrentiate from: they were saying that American stained glass used a new concept, of the medium being the message. Church windows that weren't abstract were old-fashioned, had to be commissioned from overseas studios, weren't cool.Members were to talk churches out of this type idea whenever possible. In the 1990's they began to make a big deal about restoring national treasuries of stained glass, after a chap restored Harvard's windows and felt himself an expert now. If you didn't call one of their very expensive, run-it-all-on--you like some veterinarians do studios, you were going to have your jewels trashed by bums who idn't know diddly about stained glass. The Myers studio in Tampa Florida had made their windows so excellantly that many did not need repairs 50 years later of any kind, although the restoration experts want you to pay to re-lead all windows every 25 years in the manner in which the original artist did, for a very expensive price, to maintain the integrity of his artwork. The SGA told arcitects, etc. to run from guys like the Myers, who did not have their certification. (You do not need it, and would not get it if you painted Jesus like the Rennaissance artists did and Dan Myers could.) Effectively, we were too dumb to restore our own works and Kaleidescope Glassworks, who with inherited money made fancy brochures featuring art of a German master and not saying it wasn't theirs,was chosen based on the restoration by experts only b.s. to restore several churches of windows the artist of which was right here, starving. While they pretend restoration is a valuable activity of man, they dis the artist and destroy his integrity by not allowing him the honor of restoring or repairing his work himself so that it is even still his work.He's gone--it's not his anymore. I have alwys hated this and America's proclivity for it but it all amounts to getting to own more toys, a nicer ranch, etc. Temple Scharaii Zedek in Tampa wanted to get a historical designation but had just had Dan and Walt replace Roman-numeral -numbered ten commandmants in a Moses window made by Karl Mueller Studios, with Hebrew-numbered ones and the Myers studio was asked to replace the old glass until after the windows were inspected and approved, and then stick the Hebrew numbers back in . We refused, as we'd want Mueller to do for us, had he outlasted us instead of vice-versa.. One thing they could do is get rid of the MLKJr Holiday because it is racist but they never will. |
Mary's soccer team, Blake High School;s Girl's Team, has lost every game so far. What bothers me is the times the kids go on a bus all the way to the game and then it is canceled--twice so far. Once it was resceduled and I guess someone forgot to line up referees becasue none showed so the kids had to ride 40 minutes back home. Marina got High Honor Roll and Citizenship certificates.She's been to 3 birthday parties and has 5 best friends since school began for this homeschooled high spirited lass a few months ago, after she recovered from salmonella poisoning. |
To me , this is art. Shanna photographs her son and adoptive dad fishing 2 days before entering prison for 20 years. |
Bob my guy, Marina who has felt like he is her father for the past 4 years, me, and Jim, Bob's brother. |
From the Archives of General Psychology: Background Bipolar disorder (BD) has substantial morbidity and incompletely understood neurobiological underpinnings. Objective To investigate brain chemistry in medication-free individuals with BD. Design Two-dimensional proton echo-planar spectroscopic imaging (PEPSI) (32 x 32, 1-cm3 voxel matrix) acquired axially through the cingulate gyrus was used to quantify regional brain chemistry. Setting The Center for Anxiety and Depression at the University of Washington in Seattle and the Bipolar Research Programs at McLean Hospital and the Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston. Participants Thirty-two medication-free outpatients with a diagnosis of BD type I (BDI) or BD type II (BDII), predominantly in a depressed or mixed-mood state, were compared with 26 age- and sex-matched healthy controls. Main Outcome Measures Tissue type (white and gray) and regional analyses were performed to evaluate distribution of lactate; glutamate, glutamine, and -aminobutyric acid (Glx); creatine and phosphocreatine (Cre); choline-containing compounds (Cho); N-acetyl aspartate; and myo-inositol. Chemical relationships for diagnosis and mood state were evaluated. Results Patients with BD exhibited elevated gray matter lactate (P = .005) and Glx (P = .007) levels; other gray and white matter chemical measures were not significantly different between diagnostic groups. Isolated regional chemical alterations were found. An inverse correlation between 17-item Hamilton Depression Rating Scale scores and white matter Cre levels was observed for BD patients. Conclusions Gray matter lactate and Glx elevations in medication-free BD patients suggest a shift in energy redox state from oxidative phosphorylation toward glycolysis. The possibility of mitochondrial alterations underlying these findings is discussed and may provide a theoretical framework for future targeted treatment interventions. From the Departments of Radiology (Drs Dager and Friedman), Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences (Drs Dager and Dunner), and Bioengineering (Dr Dager), University of Washington, Seattle; Consolidated Departments of Psychiatry, Harvard Medical School, Boston, Mass (Ms Parow and Drs Demopulos, Stoll, and Renshaw); and Department of Psychiatry, Seoul National University, Seoul, Korea (Dr Lyoo). |
From Archives of General Psychology: Objective To investigate natural history and prospective validation of the existence and long-episode duration of mania in children. Design Four-year prospective longitudinal study of 86 subjects with intake episode mania who were all assessed at 6, 12, 18, 24, 36, and 48 months. The phenotype was defined as DSM-IV bipolar I disorder (manic or mixed) with at least 1 cardinal symptom (elation and/or grandiosity) to ensure differentiation from attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder. Parent and child informants were separately interviewed, by highly experienced research nurses, using the Washington University in St Louis Kiddie Schedule for Affective Disorders and Schizophrenia (WASH-U-KSADS). A Children's Global Assessment Scale score of 60 or less was needed to establish definite impairment. Treatment was by subjects' community practitioners. Setting Research unit in a university medical school. Participants Subjects were obtained from psychiatric and pediatric sites by consecutive new case ascertainment, and their baseline age was 10.8 ± 2.7 years. Onset of the baseline episode was 7.4 ± 3.5 years. (Data are given as mean ± SD.) Main Outcome Measures Episode duration, weeks ill, recovery/relapse rates, and outcome predictors. Results Prospective episode duration of manic diagnoses, using onset of mania as baseline date, was 79.2 ± 66.7 consecutive weeks. Any bipolar disorder diagnosis occurred during 67.1% ± 28.5% of total weeks, during the 209.4 ± 3.3 weeks of follow-up. Subjects spent 56.9% ± 28.8% of total weeks with mania or hypomania (unipolar or mixed), and 38.7% ± 28.8% of these were with mania. Major or minor depression and dysthymia (unipolar or mixed) occurred during 47.1% ± 30.4% of total weeks. Polarity switches occurred 1.1 ± 0.7 times per year. Low maternal warmth predicted faster relapse after recovery from mania (2 = 13.6, P = .0002), and psychosis predicted more weeks ill with mania or hypomania (F1,80 = 12.2, P = .0008). Pubertal status and sex were not predictive. (Data are given as mean ± SD.) Conclusions These findings validate the existence, long-episode duration, and chronicity of child mania. Differences from the natural history of adult bipolar disorder are discussed. From the Department of Psychiatry, Washington University in St Louis, St Louis, Mo. |
___It is now a year later and Shanna says her family has gotten past their pain and troubles and wants to forget about them. That is well and good. Except it won't help the next Shanna to sweep all the others under rugs, and except that she's wrong--everyone didn't make up and get past it all and grow and change. What Shanna's mother pulled in court that day , taking 7 grand from Bob and then having his bank account closed off to him by the state the next day, bouncing his mortgage ( ---2 payments --he was behind) , auto payment, credit card payments, etc caused a rage in Bob that caused me to this day to be in a pain management program. I've even lived in a hospital 3 weeks to learn how to live the rest of my life with pain. It also devestated my little girl who , like Shanna at 6, thought of Bob as her father but the police said if my daughter was ever exposed to Bob again I'd lose custody. ( Just like Hank Carr and Bernice Bowen!) The damage is very real the pain very destructive and devestating. Maybe some of them 4 recovered but they left others in ruins in their dust. |
