Schools Responding to Increasing Abuse of Hyperactivity Drug
Associated Press, 2/13/2005

BRIDGEPORT, Conn. -- Staying up all night to cram for an exam is nothing new on college campuses, but the new drug of choice many students are using for that extra boost is. Adderall, a powerful and potentially addictive drug used to treat attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder, is increasingly finding its way onto campus and, in some cases, to high schools. The illegal use of the prescription drug is a problem educators say has grown more rampant over the past 10 years.
      At Fairfield University, health services officials are using creative methods to get the word out about misuse of Adderall and other prescription drugs. The campaign includes posting warnings in classrooms, bathrooms and hallways, said Dr. Susan Birge, assistant vice president of student resources. Birge said Adderall problems may not compare with depression or binge drinking but are on the radar of the university's counseling team.
      The Canadian government recently suspended sales of the latest version of Adderall, which has been linked to 20 sudden deaths, 14 of them children. A dozen strokes, two in children, were also reported in users taking the recommended doses. All the deaths, which date back to 1999, occurred in the United States.
      At Sacred Heart University, counselor Richard Madwid said one of his concerns is the possibility of students mixing the drug with alcohol and suffering an adverse reaction. "I have seen the level of abuse increase in the past 10 years," Madwid said. "It is comparable to all the other substances that are misused."
      Consisting of a mix of amphetamines, Adderall is known to correct chemical imbalances in the brain. A 2002 study by the University of Wisconsin reported that one out of every five college students takes the drug, many illegally. In Milford last year, a student at Jonathan Law High School was caught with the drug without having a prescription. The city's Health Department has enforced stringent guidelines that closely regulate how such medicines can be dispensed on school property, said School Nurse Administrator Joan Cagginello. Signatures from a parent and physician are needed on a special form before children can bring a prescribed substance to school with them. The drug is then placed in a locked area in the school nurse's office. "All of the nurses have medical cabinets. It is double locked," Cagginello said.

Filming of Bridge Suicides Raises Stir
Bobby Caina Calvan, Boston Globe- 2/13/2005

SAN FRANCISCO -- From dawn to dusk for a year, two video cameras caught the routine atop the deck of the world's most famous bridge -- fog sweeping across the Golden Gate, cars passing, tourists taking in vistas of San Francisco Bay. But with alarming regularity, the cameras also captured a more disturbing reality: the final anguished moments of troubled souls hurling themselves over the edge. The footage, recorded over the course of a year by a filmmaker, showed more than two dozen suicides -- generating controversy about the ethics and morality of the film project and reigniting the push for a barrier to thwart bridge jumpers. It is not known whether the filmmaker, Eric Steel, will use any of the actual suicide footage in the film, but he has said suicide will be addressed.
      Since the iconic span opened in 1937, the beauty and grandeur of the Golden Gate Bridge have been both blessing and curse, attracting millions of visitors who help sustain a vital tourist industry, but also luring dozens of despondent people each year. ''The bridge has a real mystique to it. This is where the earth seems to drop off. In a symbolic sense, this is the last stop. It's in a beautiful place, and it's a dramatic place to end one's life," said Dr. Mel Blaustein, president of the Psychiatric Foundation of Northern California, who has long been an advocate for a suicide prevention barrier at the bridge.
      At least 1,300 people have leaped to their deaths from the bridge, a statistic unmatched by any other structure, including the Eiffel Tower and the Empire State Building, both of which dramatically reduced deaths by installing suicide barriers decades ago. The first known suicide at the bridge occurred three months after the span opened. On average, someone jumps off the Golden Gate every two weeks, although some say the rate could be much higher because many suicides go unseen, perhaps committed at night, and the bodies of some victims never wash ashore. Blaustein likened the span to a loaded gun, a convenient tool for those unable to overcome the impulse to die. ''The railings are only 4 feet high. It's fast -- it only takes a four-second fall to the water -- and it's clean," he said.
      In recent weeks the Golden Gate Bridge, Highway, and Transportation District, which manages the bridge, has been under pressure to address the matter. ''It's become a real hot issue," said Mary Currie, spokeswoman for the district. ''I don't think the Eiffel Tower or the Empire State Building are any less beautiful now that they have suicide barriers," Blaustein said.
      Steel -- whose feature-film credits include ''Shaft," ''Angela's Ashes," and ''Bringing Out the Dead" -- said he would use footage from his yearlong filming at the bridge for a feature-length documentary.
      The bridge district will revisit the subject of a suicide barrier later this month, although a specific proposal will not be under consideration. Six years ago, the district's 19-member board rejected an 11-foot fence that used technology developed to control cows, deeming the design ineffective and inappropriate. Over the years, a variety of ideas have been proposed, including nets, transparent walls, and high-voltage laser beams designed to stun would-be jumpers.
      Even if bridge officials again decide to explore a suicide barrier, it would be the beginning of potentially a years-long process. ''It's not as simple as throwing up a fence," said Maureen Middlebrook, president of the district board. ''In anything we do with the bridge, there are huge things we have to take into consideration. It's not merely about the aesthetics." Besides preserving the grandeur of the Art Deco structure, there are safety and engineering concerns. A barrier would add to the span's load, and any design must account for the high winds that buffet the canyon-like inlet the bridge straddles. Unlike the less heralded Bay Bridge nearby, where few suicides occur, the Golden Gate is accessible by sidewalks and bike paths.
      Authorities once tallied bridge suicides, but halted the practice in 1995 as the number approached 1,000. The current figure of 1,300 suicides is an estimate, based mainly on coroners' records. ''People are still dying and will continue to die," said Eve Meyer, executive director of San Francisco Suicide Prevention, which operates a suicide hot line.
      To deter suicides, authorities increased patrols, provided crisis training to bridge workers, and linked traffic call boxes to the hot line. ''We have a button on our phone" for a line dedicated to calls from the bridge, ''and it has not rung, not since the first month it opened in '94," Meyer said. ''We need something, anything, to make it more difficult for people" to jump."
      Suicide is most frequently an impulsive act committed in moments of desperation, which mental health specialists say usually pass. A 1978 study by Professor Richard H. Seiden of the University of California at Berkeley tracked 515 people who had been restrained from jumping off the bridge, from its opening in 1937 to 1971. He found that 94 percent were still alive or had died from natural causes.
      Bridge suicides have always been a thorny issue for bridge authorities, who do not want to seem indifferent. They expressed dismay over the latest film project. They said they were unaware that Steel would be focusing his work on suicides until he sent an e-mail last month seeking their participation. Steel declined to be interviewed, but in his e-mail to the district, he said his film would ''challenge us to think and talk about suicide in profoundly different ways." ''In my mind, the barrier is either a curious footnote or a clever issue, a way to get at the deeper themes with which I am more concerned," Steel wrote. San Francisco Supervisor Tom Ammiano, a member of the bridge district, has called the film project ''creepy."
      Steel actually set up his cameras within the Golden Gate National Recreation Area, which is managed by the National Park Service. He told park officials he was doing the first in a series of films on America's monuments, including the Statue of Liberty and the Gateway Arch in St. Louis, park spokesman Rich Weideman said. But any distaste that the park service might feel about Steel's use of the footage is trumped by the filmmaker's First Amendment rights, said Weideman, noting that Steel complied with all rules. Still, Weideman said, ''It would have been nice to know how he planned on using it."
      Last month, ''The Joy of Life," which explores the Golden Gate's dubious reputation, debuted at the Sundance Film Festival. Its maker, Jenni Olson, contends that a suicide barrier would have prevented a friend from jumping off the bridge a decade ago. ''It is time to erect a barrier," Olson said in an interview. ''It's a spectacular view, but of tragic consequence."

Colleges Offer Classes on Relationships
Martha Irvine, Associated Press- 2/13/2005

MUNCIE, Ind. - Over the last 30 years, academics have been developing the study of "close relationships," as they call it, forming the International Association for Relationship Research to share resources and data. In recent years, though, some professors have moved beyond theory, making the discussion more personal to students by teaching relationship skills they can use outside the classroom.
      Some call it Relationships 101 - a concept that has proven wildly popular on campuses across the country. Such research is "not just about what makes people happy but how relationships can affect other things -- for instance, someone's health," says Lisa Baker, an assistant professor of psychology at Purchase College, part of the State University of New York.
      When Scott Hall wants to spark a discussion, he asks his students something bound to provoke a reaction: Do women want more out of marriage than men? The students in Hall's course on marriage at Ball State University -- many of them women -- laugh and nod at his question. Most of them agree with research he cites stating that men are most interested in a partner who's attractive and good in bed. But not Mike Toscano, a 21-year-old senior: "It's not 'Oh she looks cute and she cooked a pot pie,'" he says. "I want to be held once in a while, too, y'all." The comment draws more laughter, as Toscano blushes and smiles. "I'm glad he feels that way," Anitra Montgomery, a 22-year-old junior, responds to the class. "But he is rare!" Toscano says he and his girlfriend, Bethany Ringrose, decided to take the class together this term to see if they want to take their relationship to the next level. "It helps me understand my actions and his, too," says Ringrose, a 20-year-old junior at the school in central Indiana.
      With divorce as common as it is in this country, experts say young couples are wise to do their marriage homework. "The thinking is, the earlier people learn those skills, the better off they'll be," says Dennis Lowe, psychology professor at Pepperdine University in Malibu, Calif., who team teaches a freshman seminar called "Developing Healthy Relationships" with his wife, Emily Scott-Lowe.
      Among other things, students in the Lowes' classes practice listening -- namely giving the other person a chance to speak his or her mind without interruption. And if students are considering long-term, committed relationships, they're asked to consider questions such as whose job it would be to buy a car, discipline a child or cook dinner.
      Leslie Parrott, a professor at Seattle Pacific University, says surveys at her university and others regularly show that relationships are a priority for students. "They're often more focussed on relationship quality than their careers," says Parrott, a marriage and family therapist who teaches relationships courses with her husband, Les Parrott.
      Lecture topics include "Falling in Love Without Losing Your Mind" and "How to Break Up Without Falling Apart." The latter class includes discussion on how to end a relationship cleanly and taking time after a breakup to avoid a rebound relationship: Parrott says that session regularly draws students who aren't even enrolled in the class. "Breaking up is a real rite of passage for people their age -- they're just dying and they have no real guidance," says Parrott, who's co-authored a textbook on relationships with her husband.
      Parrott says that some academics question whether classes like these belong in a college setting. But others -- from economists to theologians -- say there's no reason love should be ignored. "The longer I live, the more I realize that the hardest thing is just relationships," says Robert Brancatelli, an assistant professor of religious studies at Santa Clara University in California's Silicon Valley. "It's hard enough to figure out yourself, let alone another person." His course, "The Theology of Marriage," challenges students to go beyond notions of romantic fantasy to ultimately view love as "a mature self, capable of offering oneself to another person freely." "And in doing so, you become more of your true self," says Brancatelli, who requires students to spend time with married couples to see what a life of commitment is really all about. "I tell them to try to get invited over for dinner," Brancatelli says, "to see what the couples are like after a couple glasses of wine."
      On the Net: International Association for Relationship Research: www.iarr.org/

Study: Binge Drinking Highest in Midwest
Associated Press, 2/14/2005

WASHINGTON -- Utah, Oregon and states in the deep South have the lowest rates of binge drinking in the country, while states in the Midwest and Great Plains have some of the highest rates, says a government study released Monday. The problem was most prevalent in North Dakota, where an estimated 31 percent of residents 12 and older had engaged in binge drinking, according to the 2003 National Survey on Drug Use and Health. Binge use was defined as consuming five or more drinks on the same occasion at least once in the last 30 days. North Dakota's rate was nearly double the 16 percent rate for Utah, which had the lowest binge drinking rate in the nation, the survey found. Utah has a large Mormon population, and members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints are forbidden to drink. The survey builds on national data released last September which found that nearly 23 percent of all U.S. residents had gone on drinking binges.
      Utah also had the lowest rate of illegal drug use among residents 12 and older: About 6 percent had used illicit drugs in the past month. That was half the 12 percent rate in Alaska, which was the highest in the country. The national average was just over 8 percent. ``While we as a nation are making overall progress in reducing illicit drug use among youth, it is clear from the findings that illicit drug, alcohol and tobacco use vary substantially among states and regions,'' said Charles Curie, head of the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration.
      Many Southern states had rates under 20 percent for binge drinking, while the rate in Oregon was 20.5 percent. Oregon, though, ranked among the top states for prevalence of marijuana use: Nearly 9 percent of residents age 12 and older had used marijuana in the last month. Oregon and other states that showed high marijuana use in the survey, including Colorado, Montana, Maine and Vermont, have laws that allow people to grow, smoke or obtain marijuana for medical needs with a doctor's recommendation. The state with the highest rate, New Hampshire at 10 percent, does not have such a law. Marijuana use was lowest in Utah at 4 percent.
      National results released in September found that fewer American youths were using marijuana, LSD and Ecstasy, but more were abusing prescription drugs. The survey also found that youths and young adults were more aware of the risks of using pot.
      On the Net: 2003 National Survey on Drug Use and Health: http://oas.samhsa.gov/

Students, Parents Often Kept in Dark About Young Sex Offenders
Claudia Rowe, Seattle Post-Intelligencer- 2/14/2005

There are about 1,800 juvenile sex offenders attending school in Washington, but most students would never know that the boy or girl sitting next to them in math class may have served time for molesting a child. While higher-risk teens must register with law enforcement upon release from a state institution, local police -- who are required to notify neighbors -- do not always inform educators. And those principals who do know of sexually criminal pasts within their student population generally say nothing to parents.
      Debra DeJohn of Shoreline learned this inadvertently when a co-worker living near a group home for young sex offenders received a flier explaining that a resident 19-year-old female, incarcerated at age 17 as a Level II sex offender, was now a special education student at Shorecrest High School. DeJohn, whose daughter plans to attend Shorecrest next year, was stunned. She and other parents had been kept completely in the dark. "I want to know why the parents of all the children she's going to school with are not informed that she's there," DeJohn said. "If the neighbors need to know ... I want to know."
      Agreeing that this lack of parental notification is a potential hazard, two lawmakers in Olympia have introduced legislation mandating wider warnings. Under bills proposed by Rep. John Lovick, D-Mill Creek, and Rep. Kirk Pearson, R-Monroe, law enforcement would be required to report young Level II or III offenders -- those deemed the highest risk -- to school officials and to make the same information available to parents upon request. "It's basically to protect the community," Lovick said. "It's a fairness issue. Students have a right to know who they're sitting next to and who they're going to be riding home with on the bus."
      Pearson, who introduced a similar bill three years ago, has been criticized by some who believe such a law would unfairly stigmatize young people. He insisted, however, that it was not meant to harass youths, merely to increase public safety. "If a sex offender moves into your neighborhood, local law enforcement officials are required to notify you," he said. "However, no method exists to know whether your children are in the same classroom with a registered sex offender. This legislation would provide another tool for parents to keep their children safe."

Jury Rejects Zoloft Defense
Associated Press, 2/15/2005

CHARLESTON, S.C. -- A 15-year-old boy who claims the antidepressant Zoloft drove him to kill his grandparents was found guilty of murder. The trial has been billed as the first case involving a youngster who says an antidepressant caused him to kill. The trial also comes at a time of heightened scrutiny over the use of antidepressants among children.
      Defense attorneys urged the jury Monday to send a message to the nation by blaming Zoloft for the killings by 15-year-old Christopher Pittman. They said the negative effects of Zoloft are more pronounced in youngsters, and the drug affected Pittman so he did not know right from wrong. ``We do not convict children for murder when they have been ambushed by chemicals that destroy their ability to reason,'' attorney Paul Waldner said.
      But prosecutors called the Zoloft defense a smokescreen, saying the then-12-year-old Pittman knew exactly what he was doing three years ago when he shot his grandparents, torched their house and then drove off in their car. Prosecutor Barney Giese said the real motivation for the crime was the boy's anger at his grandparents for disciplining him for choking a younger student on a school bus. And he reminded jurors how the boy carried out the killings -- shooting his grandfather in the mouth and his grandmother in her head while both lay sleeping. ``That anger ... came bubbling up -- came bubbling up like gas out of an oil pit,'' the prosecutor said. ``I don't care how old he is. That is as malicious a killing -- a murder -- as you are ever going to find.''
      Prosecutors also pointed to Pittman's statement to police in which he said his grandparents ``deserved it.'' ``They did not deserve those pellets in their brains,'' Giese said as he turned toward the defendant. ``No, Chris Pittman, they did not deserve it. They deserved better.'' The jury deliberated for about four hours Monday before going home for the day.
      Pittman has not denied carrying out the slayings. He is charged as an adult in the November 2001 murders of Joe Pittman, 66, and his wife Joy, 62. If convicted, he could get 30 years to life in prison.
      Zoloft is the most widely prescribed antidepressant in the United States with 32.7 million prescriptions written in 2003. Last October, the Food and Drug Administration ordered Zoloft and other antidepressants to carry ``black box'' warnings -- the government's strongest warning short of a ban -- about an increased risk of suicidal behavior in children. Pittman threatened to kill himself about a month before the slayings. He also ran away from home.

A Zealous Prosecutor of Drug Criminals Becomes One Himself
Ralph Blumenthal, New York Times- 2/15/2005

TAMPA, Tex.-- No one prosecuted the war on drugs in the Texas Panhandle more zealously than Richard James Roach. As the blustery and hot-tempered Republican district attorney for five counties overrun with methamphetamines, he had eked out an election victory in 2000 vowing a crackdown and was soon gleefully reeling off the harsh sentences he had wrung from juries: 36 years, 38 years, 40 years, 60 years, 75 years - even 99 years. "I think it's quite clear that the good citizens of this district are fed up with drugs," he said.
      He had barely missed riding the issue to victory in an earlier race. "My campaign is centered around doing something with the dope dealers," he told a local newspaper in 1996, complaining that "it's kind of hard to fight drugs when you've got dirty law enforcement." But of all the quarry brought down by drugs in the district's 4,600 square miles of achingly flat oil fields and cattle rangeland northeast of Amarillo, the biggest by far was the stunned figure clapped into handcuffs by F.B.I. agents in the Gray County courthouse here one morning last month: the $101,000-a-year prosecutor himself, Rick Roach.
      Even as he was hounding drug offenders into jail, it turned out, Mr. Roach was sinking into his own hell of drug addiction, by his own account stealing methamphetamine and other drugs from police seizures to cope with depression and sexual impotence. Equally astonishing was that his taste for drugs was hardly a secret: it had come to light in two election campaigns.
      In a chain of events that Mr. Roach said in an interview "makes absolutely no sense," he injected himself with methamphetamine in the presence of his office secretary, who was secretly working with the Federal Bureau of Investigation and Drug Enforcement Administration and who, he has since learned, was wired with a hidden recorder. "I just sort of, you might say, went nuts; I made irrational and wrong decisions," he said in several hours of often rambling narrative, part confessional, part defensive, after a reporter knocked on his door with a question on almost everyone's lips in the Panhandle: what could explain his astonishing downfall? "There's no excuse," he said. "I've gotten what I deserve." He was ill, he said; drug addiction was an illness, "but there's no defense for taking an illegal substance to treat mental illness." "Who in their right mind would inject themselves in front of an employee?" he said. Asked if he was looking to be caught, he replied, "There's some truth to that."
      Government officials said they had also been investigating him for pornography and weapons possession -- two guns were in his briefcase when he was arrested on Jan. 11, and 35 others were found in his home and office, along with stashes of drugs. Officials also were looking into his handling of millions of dollars in cash confiscated from drug traffickers along the Interstate 40 corridor that skirts the sparsely populated counties of Gray, Wheeler, Roberts, Hemphill and Lipscomb, where only 33,500 people live, fewer than 8 per square mile.

A Guilty Plea
Last Tuesday, in a deal with the United States attorney's office, Mr. Roach pleaded guilty to possessing a firearm while using illegal drugs, a charge that could send him to prison for up to 10 years and carry a fine of $250,000 when he is sentenced in coming months. Three other drug charges were dropped. He also resigned the office to which he had just been elected to a second four-year term.
      Some said that given Mr. Roach's turbulent history -- hardly a secret from the voters, who seemed perversely forgiving -- they were less than shocked. "He's a damned outlaw, he's always been an outlaw; the rules were made for him," said John Mann, a Pampa lawyer and district attorney from 1993 through 2000 who feuded with Mr. Roach, his political archrival and eventual successor. Now Mr. Roach, 55, is under house arrest, confined to his mother's and stepfather's home in Canyon, an electronic monitoring bracelet signaling the authorities if he strays more than 200 feet beyond the door. "If I'm ever a prosecutor again, which will never happen," he said, "I would be much less Rambo-ish and more compassionate in the way I handle an offense, particularly for users." Although some defense lawyers and drug defendants he prosecuted have voiced outrage, officials said it was unlikely that any of Mr. Roach's cases would be overturned merely on the basis of his conviction, without specific evidence of prosecutorial misconduct.

A Rough Road
Mr. Roach's road to the district attorney's office was hardly smooth. He came from nearby Plainview, where his father, Lavern, was a rising star in the boxing world, voted rookie of the year in 1947. On Feb. 22, 1950, his 24th birthday, Lavern Roach was felled in the 10th round of a fight with Georgie Small at St. Nicholas Arena in Manhattan and died in the hospital the next day. "He had been scheduled to fight Sugar Ray Robinson the next month," said Mr. Roach, fiddling with his father's prize gold ring. His mother remarried, and the family moved to Pampa, the Gray County seat, where Rick went to school and entered the Army, serving in Korea. At Texas Tech University in Lubbock, he studied accounting and earned a law degree.
      But he was plagued for years by alcoholism and drug addiction, at times openly, his estranged wife, Cindy, said in a separate interview at the Yellow Rose, a restaurant they once frequented. She said that made it particularly astonishing that he would ever have sought, and been elected to, a top law-enforcement position. While Mr. Roach was district attorney, his wife said she repeatedly found narcotics and drug paraphernalia in their barn and threw them away. Last year she found a tin of drug crystals in one of his coat pockets, she said. "I was furious," she said. "He had promised me." She said she dumped the crystals in the toilet and then confronted her husband. "He said he didn't know what I was talking about," she recounted.
      But around the turn of the year, Mrs. Roach said, her husband had come to her distraught. "He thought he had almost overdosed," she recalled. "He had shot something in his arm. He was scared, crying. He never cried. He wanted to come home. He had thrown everything away. If he couldn't come home, he was going to die." Janet Stone, a bartender at the Pampa Country Club, recalled that on Dec. 30, Mr. Roach was found lying on the floor in the card room, pale and shaking. He later insisted, she said, that someone had spiked his wine. Mr. Roach disputed the account but said he had indeed come to a decision: "No more illegal substances." On Jan. 3, he showed up at work determined, he said, to apologize to the staff, and "say, 'Sorry, I've been out of it,' and turn over a new leaf." But that was the day, the F.B.I. said, he injected himself with methamphetamine in front of an employee one more time. Mr. Roach identified her as his secretary, Rebecca Bailey, and remembered having an uneasy feeling. "I told Becky I felt like something bad was about to happen; I know something's not right," he said. "No," he said she had responded, "everything's fine."
      Mr. Roach's first recorded brush with the law, according to a Lubbock police record, was in 1975, when he was arrested on charges of drunken driving and using abusive racial language. The charges were later dismissed. He was working in the town of Canadian when he and Cindy met, and they married in 1980. Their relationship was stormy from the outset, she said. "He drank a lot" and sometimes smoked marijuana, she said. She left him in 1987, filing for divorce, only to withdraw the papers because, she said, by then they had three boys, including twins.

Descent Into Drugs
In 1988, while they were living in Breckenridge, between Fort Worth and Abilene, he showed signs of drug use, Mrs. Roach said. Once, she said, he drove to Plainview and begged a relative to fly him to Lubbock "because he thought an ambulance was chasing him." He finally checked himself into a treatment center, she said.
      Mr. Roach said he had suffered from depression since he was 13 and underwent treatments with a medicine chest of drugs, some self-prescribed and, recently, ordered over the Internet. "They were all debilitating on my libido, which created problems with my wife," he said. Viagra, he said, left him with a splitting headache. He said that in Breckenridge he had started injecting methamphetamine, finding eventually that, mixed with the sexual enhancer Levitra, it had the desired effect. "I was going to patent it," he said with a hollow laugh. "I'm definitely a mixed-up person."
      He said the pornographic images reported on his office computer had popped up unbidden, and that once he replied to be taken off the list to receive them, the solicitations multiplied. He said he had not stolen seized drug money or maintained an arsenal, describing the weapons as heirlooms and collectors' pieces.
      Mr. Roach's first campaign for district attorney came in 1996. At the time he was the Roberts County attorney, prosecuting misdemeanor cases at $500 a month. His opponent, Mr. Mann, won the race by 500 votes and according to Mrs. Roach, the loss plunged her husband into depression.
It was a hard fought race, with a zesty local weekly, The Canadian Record, printing reports of Mr. Roach's drug abuse and legal problems.
      Four years later Mr. Roach beat Mr. Mann by 6 votes in a Republican primary marred by charges of fraud, and then beat him again - by 21 votes - after a court ordered a new election. He went on to win the general election. Mr. Mann said the voters were chiefly swayed by Mr. Roach's highly popular family, particularly his stepfather, Weldon Trice, a beloved high school football coach.
      Mrs. Roach said their lives slid badly downhill in late 2003. She found glass smoking or snorting implements, foil packets with a burn hole, and white powder and a razor blade in their barn and spied on her husband sniffing something. Mr. Roach said of his downfall, "It just presented itself." He said that in July 2004 he had come across a glass pipe that Texas troopers had overlooked in searching a seized car. "A girl called it a crack pipe, so I assumed there was crack in it," he said. He took it home. "I happened to be having a bad day, so I smoked it in the barn," he said. Soon after, he said, he found another stash of overlooked drugs. "I just remember how ecstatic I was when I found it," he recalled. He used that, too.
      On Dec. 16, the F.B.I. said in affidavits for search warrants, one of Mr. Roach's employees found a syringe floating in the toilet of the office bathroom. Tests showed it contained residue of methamphetamine. On. Dec. 20, Dec. 31 and Jan. 3, the F.B.I. said, he was seen by an unnamed witness injecting methamphetamine. The only one who could have seen him, Mr. Roach said, was Ms. Bailey, who later went public as the named complainant in the lawsuit to remove him from office. Ms. Bailey, at her desk in the district attorney's office, did not dispute it, saying, "He trusted me." She declined to say more until the sentencing.
      Mrs. Roach voiced no interest in a reconciliation but at one point sounded wistful. "He told me, 'There are some things you don't know about me,' " she recalled. "I wasn't patient. I should have shut up and listened."
      At his parents' house, Mr. Roach stepped outside the house for a cigarette. He had been pronounced addiction-free at a Dallas treatment facility he was sent to after his arrest, he said, but still needed his nicotine. Smoking is banned in prison, he reflected bleakly. He should give it up, he said, but added that now "is not a good time to give up anything." If he is sentenced to prison, he said, he does not know where he will end up, but that no place will be much good. "Prosecutors don't do well in the pen," he said.

Experts Question Rise in Pediatric Diagnosis of Bipolar Illness
Sandra G. Boodman, Washington Post- 2/15/2005

From the time her son was born, Jennifer DeWeese said, she suspected something was wrong. As an infant he cried inconsolably and slept mostly in hour-long snatches. At 3, he was always irritable and had prolonged tantrums triggered by the slightest change in his routine. A therapist told his mother he was emotionally disturbed and suggested she read a popular book about childhood bipolar disorder. A year later a child psychiatrist in Virginia Beach made the diagnosis: the 4 1/2 -year-old was manic-depressive. A few months later, when his even-tempered sister grew moody and volatile, DeWeese took her to the same psychiatrist. They sat down with DeWeese's well-thumbed book about bipolar children and went through its symptom checklist. Based largely on those results and the family's history -- DeWeese said she learned during her divorce that the children's father had been diagnosed as bipolar in high school -- the psychiatrist told DeWeese her 5 1/2-year-old daughter was bipolar, too. "I feel relieved to know there is something causing their symptoms and something we can do about it," said DeWeese, 34. She is convinced, she said, that her children's problems are inherited, not a reaction to their father's permanent departure, a bitter divorce marked by allegations of spousal abuse, a bankruptcy that resulted in the loss of the family's house and car, DeWeese's frequent hospitalizations for kidney disease and the arrival of a new stepfather.
      Now 6 and 8, DeWeese's son and daughter exemplify a trend that is roiling mental heath: the burgeoning number of children diagnosed with bipolar illness, also known as manic depression, which affects about 2.3 million Americans. The illness, which is usually diagnosed in adolescence or early adulthood, is a serious and disabling mood disorder that, if untreated, carries an elevated risk of suicide. Sufferers typically cycle between manic highs, in which they can go for days without sleep in the grip of grandiose delusions, and depressive lows, marked by a preoccupation with death and feelings of worthlessness.
      There is no test for bipolar illness, which is believed to result from a poorly understood interplay between genetics and environment. Although the disease runs in families, according to the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH), most children with one bipolar parent won't develop the illness. Their risk is about 10 to 15 percent compared with 1 percent among the general population. NIMH officials say there are no reliable statistics on the risk posed by having two bipolar parents. Statistics documenting the increase in pediatric bipolar diagnoses are elusive, but a dozen psychiatrists and child psychologists in the Washington area and elsewhere interviewed for this story say there have been sharp increases in the past decade. Before that, the illness was rarely diagnosed before adolescence.
      Although definitive answers about the disorder in children await the results of several NIMH-funded studies currently underway, many doctors aren't waiting. Proponents of early intervention say that aggressive treatment can limit the damage of untreated mental illness. As a result, some preschoolers barely out of diapers are being treated for bipolar disorder with powerful drugs, few of which have been tested in children.
      At Dominion Hospital in Falls Church, which houses the Washington area's largest inpatient psychiatric unit for children, psychiatrist Gary Spivack said patients as young as 4 have been hospitalized, sometimes for a few weeks at a time. "They're just so out of control that almost nothing else has the power to do it," Spivack said, who adds that many were being raised in highly dysfunctional homes.
      But some experts say the surge in diagnoses is a dangerous fad -- one critic called it "psychiatry's flavor of the month" -- a decision too often based on skimpy evidence, cursory evaluations and incorrect assumptions about genetic risk. These children are troubled, critics say, but most don't meet psychiatry's official diagnostic criteria for the lifelong psychotic disorder. "Labeling severe tantrums in toddlers as a major mental illness lacks . . . validity and undermines credibility in our profession," warns Jon McClellan, associate professor of psychiatry at the University of Washington, in a forthcoming article in the Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry. "The illness has become a cultural phenomenon, adorning the cover of Time magazine and headlining national news broadcasts."
      It has also spawned numerous Web sites and more than a dozen books mostly aimed at parents. Two of them are written for children, including "Matt: The Moody Hermit Crab," whose main character winds up in a mental hospital after he tries to stab his family with a kitchen knife.

'Very Disturbed Children'
Joseph Biederman, a professor of psychiatry at Harvard and one of the most forceful advocates of the aggressive treatment of preschoolers, thinks bipolar disorder has been "severely under-diagnosed" in children. He likens the criticism he has encountered to the outrage that greeted Galileo's challenge to the notion that the Earth was flat. "The diagnosis is controversial only because it has been assumed not to exist," said Biederman, chief of pediatric psychopharmacology at Massachusetts General Hospital.
      In his view there are clear-cut symptoms that distinguish bipolar disorder from attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), with which it is often confused, or other problems. He said studies have found that bipolar children are severely agitated and aggressive, grandiose (they tell the teacher how to run the class or think they have the same authority as a parent), hypersexual (one report cites children who imitate sexy rock stars or use explicit language) and experience very rapid mood swings, sometimes several times an hour, during which they can become explosively angry. "These are very disturbed children that are a nightmare to treat," said Biederman, who estimates he has seen nearly 100 of them: 3-year-olds so assaultive their parents feared for their safety; 5-year-olds who downloaded pornography from the Internet; and preschoolers who literally tore apart his office during a consultation. "These symptoms are not subtle," he said.
      Maybe not, said Washington psychiatrist and lawyer Wayne Blackmon, but they are also suggestive of a host of other problems: depression, anxiety, abuse, ADHD or a behavioral problem such as conduct, explosive or oppositional defiant disorder. "With kids, especially little kids, all disorders pretty much look alike," added Blackmon, a former president of the Medical Society of the District of Columbia. "Kids tend to behave by lashing out and acting out."
      Experts on both sides agree that the 1999 publication of "The Bipolar Child" had a galvanizing effect. Supporters of early diagnosis and treatment say the book empowered parents and informed clinicians. Critics say it is rife with pseudoscience and exaggeration. Written by New York psychiatrist Demitri Papolos, research director of the Juvenile Bipolar Research Foundation, and his wife, Janice, the book has sold more than 100,000 copies and led to the couple's appearances on "Oprah" and NPR's "Morning Edition." It is the book DeWeese said she relied on and the one the Virginia Beach psychiatrist used in diagnosing her children.
      "This book revolutionized child psychiatry," said Washington University in St. Louis psychiatry professor Barbara Geller, who called it "data-free" and "very controversial." Geller said she thinks the book had a positive influence because parents read it "and began pouring into child psychiatry clinics" for help. "When I give talks now, it's a very different response than five or 10 years ago," said Geller, who is conducting a long-term study of bipolar children funded by NIMH. "The reaction used to be, 'I don't really believe it's out there.' " Now, she said, the question she hears is, "How can I recognize it?"
      The 419-page second edition is replete with anecdotes, many of them desperate parents' postings from Web sites. It lists famous people the authors say were bipolar, including Abraham Lincoln, Ludwig van Beethoven and Teddy Roosevelt. And it describes what the authors call "ultra ultra rapid cycling" -- mood swings that occur as often as every few minutes throughout the day, a phenomenon some child psychiatrists say they have never observed.
      Among the book's most controversial features is its list of more than three dozen symptoms commonly seen in bipolar children, including silliness, separation anxiety, night terrors, carbohydrate cravings, fidgetiness, extreme bossiness, bed-wetting, lying, social anxiety and difficulty getting up in the morning. "That book cast such a wide net that everyone is being called bipolar," said Parmajt Joshi, chief of psychiatry at Children's National Medical Center in Washington. "There are too many kids whose parents read the book and come in and say, 'I think my kid has this,' when they don't. "We see that a lot."
      Houston child psychiatrist Laurel L. Williams says she has "un-diagnosed" between 50 and 75 children in the past few years who had been declared bipolar by other physicians, mostly psychiatrists. Last April she published a study in Psychiatric Times detailing the cases of three preschoolers whose symptoms resulted from communication disorders, not manic depression.
      Papolos said he doesn't believe his book has contributed to misdiagnosis. "If they read our book, I think they see a symptom picture in their children that is fairly comprehensive," he said. Some desperate parents, who have struggled for years with their children's problems and an acute shortage of mental health services, say the book's descriptions resonated with them and they found its take-charge tone reassuring. "I was relieved because it made sense," said Elise Cohen of Rockville, a medical librarian whose daughter was diagnosed last year at age 10. "If we have a diagnosis there are treatments, even if it's not what you want to hear."

Growing Acceptance of Drugs
Until recently, many doctors were reluctant to prescribe the powerful mood-stabilizing drugs adults take for bipolar disorder to young children, whose central nervous systems are still developing. Most of these drugs -- which can have serious and sometimes life-threatening side effects, including diabetes, significant weight gain, hormonal problems that can cause infertility, and fatal blood disorders -- have not been tested in children. Some are epilepsy drugs used to control seizures and not approved to treat psychiatric disorders, which are widely used anyway because some doctors think they are effective.
      Resistance to using medications has softened, experts say, for a variety of reasons: aggressive marketing by pharmaceutical companies; the skyrocketing use of drugs in preschoolers to treat ADHD and depression; a lessening of the stigma surrounding bipolar disorder spurred by the accounts of celebrities such as Ted Turner and Jane Pauley; and an insurance system that rewards brief appointments to check mediation over time-consuming diagnostic evaluations and behavioral therapy.
      The realization that "these are biological illnesses that require biological treatment and that you don't have to let these kids suffer" is relatively recent, said Martha Hellander, a lawyer and the founding executive director of the six-year-old Child and Adolescent Bipolar Foundation (CABF), an influential advocacy group based in Illinois. Hellander said the nonprofit foundation, which has 25,000 members, receives funding from several drug companies. Medications are a cornerstone of treatment, Hellander said, even for very young children. She said the youngest patient she's heard of is an 18-month-old girl who was diagnosed as bipolar largely because she screamed incessantly and had a bipolar mother. Hellander said the baby was medicated with lithium. Most children take at least three drugs simultaneously to control their moods and alleviate depression. Some try dozens of combinations and doses.
      DeWeese said her daughter, who has tried more than half a dozen drugs, some of which made her act like "a raging maniac," currently takes Abilify, an antipsychotic primarily used to treat schizophrenia in adults. Recently, DeWeese said, the dose had to be cut after the 8-year-old started drooling and one side of her face drooped. Hellander said parents are often asked how they can give these drugs to their children. "We don't have any choice," she said, comparing them to lifesaving chemotherapy. "Most of us are grateful these medications exist. In earlier days our children would have been institutionalized."
      But Blackmon said the drugs can cause the very symptoms they have been given to treat: hyperactivity, insomnia and even psychosis. "There's a lot of throwing medications at people without thinking about what the problem is," he added. "Once somebody has a label, it is highly unlikely that label will be questioned. And by the time a person has been on 20 different drugs, you can no longer figure out what's wrong." Donna DeHart Burson agrees. Her 13-year-old daughter has taken more than a dozen drugs since her diagnosis several years ago. "If one doesn't work, the doctors' answer is to just keep adding more and more medications" or increasing the doses, said Burson, who lives near Winchester, Va.

Don't Blame the Parents
Many parents say that a bipolar diagnosis meant they were no longer blamed for their children's behavior. "At first he only had meltdowns in front of me," recalled Rebecca Goolsby of Springfield, a Navy scientist whose son was diagnosed last year at 5. "Everyone told me it was me, that I was just not handling him well. It was the most horrible thing to sit there every day and have people telling you that." "It is not a parenting issue," said Karen Leatherdale, of New Brunswick, N.J. She said she finds it hard to ignore the stares when her 6-year-old son, diagnosed at 3, has a meltdown in Wal-Mart. "We can't stop this from happening. It is nothing we can control or the child can control."
      The University of Washington's McClellan has a different view. "There are a lot of kids who have problems regulating their behavior," he said, but he is concerned that the singular focus on drugs may give short shrift to behavioral strategies or personal responsibility. "There's something very seductive about being told that your kid has a neurobiological disorder and needs to be medicated," said McClellan, who is chairing a committee on pediatric bipolar disorder for the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry. "It lets people off the hook."
      McClellan, who directs a state hospital program for children, said that proper treatment requires a careful diagnostic evaluation. Such an evaluation can take four hours or more and includes interviews and observations of the parents and child, psychological testing, a physical exam, detailed family history and information from teachers, coaches, day care staffers and others who know the child. But psychiatrists say that insurance reimbursement is skewed in favor of medication -- and little else. A psychiatrist can make two or three times as much from an hour of medication checks than from an hour of therapy.
      Although it's not discussed much, misdiagnosis can have a profound impact. One woman, who agreed to be interviewed on the condition that her name not be published to protect her daughter's privacy, said that when the girl was 14, she was handed a prescription for lithium after a single visit to a psychiatrist. Four years later, doctors discovered that her severe depression and mood swings were the result of an undiagnosed pituitary tumor. "She's really angry at the doctors and at me because I accepted the diagnosis too fast," the woman said. Her daughter, she said, "barely got through high school" and had side effects from the lithium, which made her hair fall out. Now 19, she said, her daughter is caught in a Catch-22: Because the family was open about her diagnosis, she feels the need "to tell everyone she's not bipolar. And the reaction she's encountered is not what she thought. It's, 'Oh sure, the bipolar doesn't think she's bipolar.' "

Report Questions Stress Disorder Efforts
Associated Press, 2/16/2005

WASHINGTON -- Congressional investigators are questioning whether the Veterans Affairs Department can adequately help troops who may return from Iraq and Afghanistan with post-traumatic stress disorder. The agency said that so far it has treated 6,400 veterans of the Afghanistan and Iraq wars for the disorder and that overall, its health care system has provided such services for 244,000 veterans.
      But the Government Accountability Office, in a report Wednesday, said it is not clear whether the VA can meet the demands for treatment from veterans of those two recent wars. Agency data for the 2004 budget year show that fewer than half of those using VA health care are screened for the disorder, according to the investigative arm of Congress. If veterans returning from combat do not have access to these services, ``many mental health experts believe that the chance may be missed ... to lessen the severity of symptoms and improve the overall quality of life'' for those with the disorder, the report said.
      The VA contended the report did not accurately describe the type of services for post-traumatic stress disorder that the agency has provided over the past 20 years or its ability to provide such services in the future. ``We take exception to this report,'' said Dr. Jonathan Perlin, VA's acting undersecretary for health. The report says the VA is a ``world leader in PTSD treatment,'' Perlin noted. The report was requested by Illinois Rep. Lane Evans, the House Veterans Committee's ranking Democrat.
      Some experts estimate about 15 percent of military personnel serving in Iraq and Afghanistan could develop the mental health condition. Symptoms include intense anxiety, insomnia and difficulty coping with work, family and social relationships. If the disorder is not treated, it can lead to substance abuse, severe depression and suicide.
      Investigators said the VA's has partially put in place 14 of the two dozen recommendations from an advisory committee that Congress created; the VA says it has completed seven. The delay ``raises questions about VA's capacity to identify and treat veterans returning from military combat who may be at risk'' for developing the disorder, and maintaining treatment for veterans already receiving help, according to the report.
      On the Net: Government Accountability Office: http://www.gao.gov

Defrocked Priest's Accuser Hailed As Hero
Joanna Weiss, Boston Globe-2/16/2005

CAMBRIDGE -- Defrocked priest Paul R. Shanley was sentenced to 12 to 15 years in prison yesterday before a roomful of alleged clergy sexual abuse victims, who declared the conclusion to his criminal trial a step toward collective justice. When Shanley, a central figure in the Catholic Archdiocese of Boston's clergy sexual abuse scandal, was led away in leg shackles and handcuffs, a brief burst of applause was heard in the Middlesex Superior courtroom. Shanley's accuser, a 27-year-old firefighter, was greeted with hugs, handshakes, and gratitude. The victim is a hero, said Arthur Austin, 56, who says he was raped by Shanley as a young man. ''What it came down to at last" was the man ''taking on the dragon of Paul Shanley's 40-year reign of terror," Austin said. ''So just by default, he was doing it for the rest of us."
      The courtroom was fuller than it was during Shanley's two-week trial, largely with alleged victims like Austin, who could not press charges because of the statute of limitations. The sentencing was the final chapter in a trial fraught with symbolism and high expectations: a means of catharsis for Shanley's alleged victims, a witch hunt to his supporters.
      In a statement read by prosecutor Lynn Rooney, the victim pleaded with the judge for a hefty sentence and suggested that he was asking on behalf of many others. ''That pervert has victimized many, many people," the victim wrote. ''Don't deny them their justice, too." For Shanley, the man had a pointed wish: ''I want him to die in prison. Whether it's of natural causes or otherwise. However he dies, I hope it's slow and painful!"
      The man's wife and father also spoke, accusing Shanley of destroying his victim's faith. The accuser's wife, 23, said her husband refuses to step inside a church for a wedding, funeral, or christening. She called Shanley ''a coward who hid behind God." ''No matter how many private pleas you make to God for forgiveness, he will see through you," she said. ''You are sick to your core."
      Shanley, 74, a former ''street priest" known for his ministry to troubled youth, was convicted last week of two counts of child rape and two counts of indecent assault and battery against a child. The charges stemmed from the early 1980s, when he was a parish priest at St. Jean's Church in Newton, where his victim was a Sunday school student. Prosecutors had asked for a sentence of life in prison.
      Shanley's defense lawyer, Frank Mondano, said yesterday that a fair trial was impossible because of the sexual abuse scandal. Mondano sought a lesser sentence in a county house of correction, arguing that Shanley had health problems, no criminal record, and no likelihood of being a security risk. ''This man's life stands for the prospect of service to others," Mondano told Superior Court Judge Stephen Neel, and some in the courtroom snorted. Mondano said he will appeal both the sentence and the conviction.
      Neel sentenced Shanley to two concurrent 12-to-15-year sentences, followed by 10 years of probation, and no contact with children under age 16. He said Shanley will not be eligible for parole until he is in his 80s. In determining a sentence, Neel said, he considered 18 letters from Shanley supporters, who praised the former priest for his work helping the homeless and addicted, the medical care he brought to young people on the street, and his support of gays and lesbians struggling with their identity. But he also contended that Shanley's victim was young and vulnerable and that Shanley had abused his position as a priest. ''It is difficult to imagine a more egregious misuse of trust and authority than that which occurred in this case," Neel said.
      Middlesex District Attorney Martha Coakley told reporters yesterday that the victim, who declined to talk to the media, was disappointed that Shanley did not receive a life sentence. But other alleged victims said yesterday that the verdict itself gave them a sense of deep relief. Greg Ford, one of four original Shanley accusers in the criminal case, faced Shanley for the first time yesterday since the trial began. Prosecutors ultimately dropped Ford and two other victims from the case, hinging it instead on the testimony of a single man. Yesterday, Ford thanked the victim ''for the courage he showed to do it by himself."
      Because Shanley committed the crimes before state sentencing laws changed in 1993, Neel was required to punish him under the prior rules, legal specialists said yesterday. Under those rules, Shanley would be eligible for parole in early 2013, after serving eight years. Even if he is not paroled, Shanley could still be released for good behavior, without the conditions of parole, in early 2014 after serving just under nine years, legal specialists said. If he is released early, Coakley said, prosecutors would probably seek to have him committed as a ''sexually dangerous person," a right they now have under state law. ''In a practical matter," she said, ''the sentence imposed today will be life."
      Throughout the trial and sentencing, Shanley, a slender, balding man who wore loose-fitting suits and a hearing aid, never spoke on his own behalf. He was stone-faced yesterday as court officers closed handcuffs around his wrists. Paul Shannon, a friend of Shanley's, questioned whether the victim's allegations were true and likened the case to the Salem witch trials. ''Everyone just gets caught up in a certain belief system," Shannon said, arguing that the jury was swayed more by emotion than the facts of the case.
      A group of state lawmakers and advocates for abuse victims said they would use Shanley's sentencing to make a renewed push today for legislation abolishing the 15-year statute of limitations for the most serious sex crimes, including rape of a child. Representative Ronald Mariano, a sponsor of the legislation, said that because it can take decades for victims of child sexual abuse to work up the courage to come forward, the majority of abusive priests will never face justice in a criminal court. ''Most of the victims who were abused were abused by people in positions of authority," said Mariano, a Quincy Democrat. ''They need time."