Noteworthy News Articles on Mental Health Topics, February 11-15, 2008



The Super Bowl Spotlight Shines on a Changed Man
Greg Bishop & Pete Thamel, New York Times- 2/11/2008

WAYNE, N.J. — The walls of the jail cell were built from stone, providing the perfect place for David Tyree to hit rock bottom. Arrested for drug possession after the police found half a pound of marijuana in his car, caged between stone walls and steel bars, Tyree covered his face with his hands. Those hands, with awkwardly bent fingers and mangled knuckles, grabbed national attention years later. During the Giants’ improbable Super Bowl victory over the undefeated Patriots, Tyree caught a desperation pass on the winning drive by pinning the ball against his helmet.
      The catch introduced the 28-year-old Tyree to the world. He made the cover of Sports Illustrated and flew last week to Los Angeles to appear on national talk shows. “What looked to be the lowest point in my life ended up being the greatest thing that ever happened to me,” Tyree, speaking of his arrest in 2004, said Saturday morning while sitting at his kitchen table.
     From special-teams demon to Super Bowl deity. From moonlighting drug dealer to born-again Christian. From a child who drank alcohol and smoked marijuana with his family to a sober father and husband who started his own nonprofit organization. This is Tyree’s version of his transformation. The first time he can remember vomiting after drinking alcohol was in eighth grade. By his junior year at Montclair High School, he celebrated the same way after every football game — drinking a 40-ounce bottle of malt liquor and a half-pint of Jack Daniel’s whiskey, and smoking a blunt, a skinny cigar hollowed and filled with marijuana.
     Tyree’s mother, Thelma, tolerated drug use in her home. She also smoked marijuana. Her philosophy, according to Tyree: “She would rather us be at home, acting the complete fool under her watch, than out on the streets, doing the same things and finding trouble that was definitely waiting for us. My house was a free-for-all.” “Patrolling the devil’s den,” is how Tyree describes his high school life. He said that Thelma was a wonderful mother, that they were as close as mother and son could be. He does not want their relationship misinterpreted.
     Born in East Orange, N.J., raised mostly in Montclair, Tyree developed a mentality built on toughness. This served him well on the football field and helped him find trouble off it. In college at Syracuse, Tyree often drank until he blacked out. One morning, he woke up naked. Another morning, he woke up covered in mud. Each time, he could not remember why.
     The Giants drafted Tyree in the sixth round in 2003. He went to church and claimed to be a Christian. But he also wanted to live what he called “an N.F.L. lifestyle” — booze and drugs and women, all readily available since he had money. In his rookie season, Tyree was the N.F.L.’s special-teams rookie of the year and the Giants’ rookie of the year. But his seemingly perfect life was unraveling. Near the end of Tyree’s rookie season, Coach Jim Fassel fined him $10,000 for being late to a team meeting. Tyree apologized the next day and thanked Fassel for the lesson in maturity. Fassel said he could not remember anyone ever thanking him for a fine.
     Privately, Tyree figured he would recoup the fine. “I’m smoking the best bud, so I might as well start selling it,” he said of his thinking. “That just shows you the mind-set that you have. You’ve got gangsters, you listen to 50 Cent, all this craziness. That’s the life I was living. So it made sense, man. ‘I just lost 10 G’s. I’ve got to hit the streets and get my money back.’ ”
     The morning Tyree left jail, in March 2004, his estranged girlfriend, Leilah, sent him a text message. It read, “I’m with child.” She was pregnant with their second son. He promised to visit her in Syracuse and went home and downed a bottle of Rémy Martin cognac. During the visit that month, Leilah presented Tyree with an ultimatum — her lifestyle or his.
     Tyree promised change, just as he had promised before. He glimpsed a Bible on her bed, and when he picked it up and started reading from the book of Genesis, for the first time, the words on the page made sense. He went home and “called every woman and told them, ‘Things are about to change.’” Tyree said he never drank again. Then one day, for no reason in particular, Tyree went to the Bethel Church of Love and Praise in Bloomfield, N.J. He sat in the back, about a month after the arrest. A woman started singing before the congregation, her voice, loud and passionate, filling the room. As Tyree listened, he felt her joy and realized he had none. He lowered his head into his hands and started crying, first sniffles, then sobs lasting 25 minutes. “I’m a successful player in the N.F.L., having what most people would desire for their lives,” Tyree said. “I’m at the pinnacle of sports. But I had no joy. I had no peace. My life was obviously in disarray.”
     As Tyree talks, his family floats between the kitchen and the living room. His 6-year-old son, Teyon, grabs the digital recorder off the table. His 3-year-old son, Josiah, watches a movie in the basement. Leilah, now his wife, prepares for an afternoon baby shower. She is expecting twin girls later this month. Missing from the picture is Thelma, who died in December of a heart attack at age 59. After Tyree found God, they went through a rough patch. He described himself then as “the Christian you don’t like,” someone who was overbearing in his beliefs. He sometimes told his mother: “You need to find Jesus. You’re going to hell.” When Thelma died in Florida, a few years after she said she found God, her final words were: “I’m liberated.” Up the coast, Tyree and the Giants were preparing for a game against the Redskins. The Giants pulled Tyree out of a team meeting. Leilah had tears in her eyes. “Your mom,” she stammered. “Your mom died of a heart attack.” For five minutes that seemed like hours, Tyree stood and stared out the nearest window. He felt someone rubbing his back, whispering in his ear. He turned to look. It was Giants Coach Tom Coughlin. “He always believed in me,” Tyree said.
     After the Giants started the season 0-2, while Tyree was recovering from a fractured wrist, he wrote a letter to his teammates and stuffed it in each locker. The message was: Something special would happen this season. Tyree never expected to make possibly the greatest catch in the history of the Super Bowl. He never expected an earlier touchdown grab in the same game, his first of the season. Or the trip to Los Angeles, the personalized underwear — with an 8 and a 5, representing his jersey number — from Ellen DeGeneres, or the bear hug from the entertainer Flavor Flav on Jimmy Kimmel’s show. The producers at DeGeneres’s show even fashioned Velcro to a helmet and attached a football to it, simulating Tyree’s circus grab. “It’s imperative for me not to act like this was all me,” Tyree said.
     Though the catch opened up numerous marketing opportunities for the once-anonymous Tyree, he remains more concerned with changing lives. In 2006, Tyree and his wife started Next in Line, a project that counsels teenagers. Markell Hardy, a 14-year-old freshman at Montclair High, said she knew Tyree for a month before she found out he played football. She talked about trips to Six Flags, to Giants games and dinners. “He really doesn’t come off like he’s a big football player,” Hardy said. “I think of him as my uncle. I just love him.”
     A week ago, the world knew little of Tyree. Four years ago, he claims to have only vaguely known himself. “It’s more than just a feel-good story,” Tyree said. “It’s not about David Tyree. It’s bigger than this Super Bowl catch. It’s about destiny and purpose.”


You Remind Me of Me
Benedict Carey, New York Times- 2/12/2008

Artful persuasion depends on eye contact, but not just any kind. If one person prefers brief glances and the other is busy staring deeply, then it may not matter how good the jokes are or how much they both loved “Juno.” Rhythm counts.

Voice cadence does, too. People who speak in loud, animated bursts tend to feed off others who do the same, just as those who are lower key tend to relax in a cool stream of measured tones.

“Myself, I’m very conscious of people’s body position,” said Ray Allieri of Wellesley, Mass., a former telecommunications executive with 20 years in marketing and sales. “If they’re leaning back in their chair, I do that, and if they’re forward on their elbows, I tend to move forward,”

Psychologists have been studying the art of persuasion for nearly a century, analyzing activities like political propaganda, television campaigns and door-to-door sales. Many factors influence people’s susceptibility to an appeal, studies suggest, including their perception of how exclusive an opportunity is and whether their neighbors are buying it.

Most people are also strongly sensitive to rapport, to charm, to the social music in the person making the pitch. In recent years, researchers have begun to decode the unspoken, subtle elements that come into play when people click.

They have found that immediate social bonding between strangers is highly dependent on mimicry, a synchronized and usually unconscious give and take of words and gestures that creates a current of good will between two people.

By understanding exactly how this process works, researchers say, people can better catch themselves when falling for an artful pitch, and even sharpen their own social skills in ways they may not have tried before.

“Really good salespeople, and for that matter good con artists, have known about these skills and used them forever,” Jeremy Bailenson, a psychologist at Stanford, said. “All we’re doing now is measuring and describing more precisely what it is they’re doing, whether consciously or not.”

Imitation is one of the most common and recognizable behaviors in the animal kingdom. Just as baby chimps learn to climb by aping their elders, so infants pick up words and gestures by copying parents. They sense and mimic peers’ behavior from early on, too, looking up at the ceiling if others around them do so or mirroring others’ cringes of fear and anxiety.

Such behavioral contagion probably evolved early for survival, some scientists argue. It is what scatters a flock well before most members see a lunging predator.

Yet by drawing on apparently similar skills, even in seemingly trivial ways, people can prompt almost instantaneous cooperation from complete strangers.

In a recent experiment, Rick van Baaren, a psychologist at Nijmegen University in the Netherlands, had student participants go to a lab and give their opinions about a series of advertisements. A member of his research team mimicked half the participants while they spoke, roughly mirroring the posture and the position of their arms and legs, taking care not to be too obvious.

Minutes later, the experimenter dropped six pens on the floor, making it look like an accident.

In several versions of this simple sequence, participants who had been mimicked were two to three times as likely to pick up the pens as those who had not.

The mimicry had not only increased good will toward the researcher within minutes, the study concluded, but it also prompted “an increased pro-social orientation in general.”

That orientation applies to far more than dropped pens. In a study due out in the spring, Robin Tanner and Tanya Chartrand, psychologists at Duke, led a research team that tested how being mimicked might affect the behavior of a potential client or investor.

The team had 37 Duke students try out what was described as a new sports drink, Vigor, and answer a few questions about it. The interviewer mimicked about half the participants using a technique Dr. Chartrand had developed in earlier studies.

The technique involved mirroring a person’s posture and movements, with a one- to two-second delay. If he crosses his legs, then wait two seconds and do the same, with opposite legs. If she touches her face, wait a beat or two and do that. If he drums his fingers or taps a toe, wait again and do something similar.

The idea is to be a mirror but a slow, imperfect one. Follow too closely, and most people catch it — and the game is over.

In the study, the researchers set up the interviews so each student’s experience was virtually identical, except for the mimicking.

None of the copied participants picked up on the mimicry. But by the end of the short interview, they were significantly more likely than the others to consume the new drink, to say they would buy it and to predict its success in the market.

In a similar experiment, the psychologists found that this was especially true if the participants knew that the interviewer, the mimic, had a stake in the product’s success.

“This is somewhat counterintuitive,” Dr. Chartrand said in an interview. “Normally, you’d expect when people realize that someone was invested in a product and trying to sell it to them, their reaction would be attenuated. They’d be less enthusiastic.

“But we found that people who were mimicked actually felt more strongly about the product when they knew the other person was invested in it.”

Any amiable conversation provides ample evidence of this subconscious social waltz. Smiles are contagious. So is nodding, in an amiable conversation.

Accents converge quickly and automatically. A country chime or an Irish whistle can seemingly infect the voice of a New Yorker in a 10-minute phone call.

“I especially find myself falling into a Southern accent, which is crazy,” Mr. Allieri, the telecom executive, said. “I’m from Boston.

“But I think what good salespeople really do is pick up on physical cues and respond to them without thinking much about it.”

It is one thing to move like a naturally synchronized swimmer through the pools of everyday conversation without thinking, however. It is another to deliberately employ mimicry to persuade or seduce.

Dr. Bailenson, the Stanford psychologist, has been testing the effects of different forms of mimicry by programming a computer-generated figure, an avatar, to mirror the movements and gestures of people in a study.

He has found that his subjects pick up the mimicry when it is immediate and precise. If the avatar is slightly out of sync, however — waits four seconds, for instance — then the mimicking goes unnoticed, and the usual rules apply. The virtual creating comes across as warm and convincing, as if controlled by another human.

“The point is it’s a delicate balance to get it right, and I suspect that people who are good at this know how to do it intuitively,” Dr. Bailenson said.

Or they have developed ways to engage their skills indirectly.

Veldon Smith, a musician and legendary salesman living in Centennial, Colo., who spent 30 years in the automobile parts business before retiring a few years ago, said:

“One thing I always did, I learned as much as possible about a client before I visited, what their problem was, what they were worried about. Then I would go in with a story about myself being in the same predicament.

“So when I walked in, I was in exactly the same frame of mind as the customer. I was immediately on the same wavelength. Everything else kind of flowed out of that.”

One reason subtle mimicry is so instantly beguiling may be that it draws on and, perhaps, activates brain circuits involved in feelings of empathy.

In several studies, Jean Decety, a neuroscientist at the University of Chicago, has shown that some of the same brain regions that are active when a person feels pain also flare up when that person imagines someone else like a loved one feeling the same sting or ache.

A similar process almost certainly occurs when a person takes pleasure in the good fortune of a friend or the apparent enjoyment of a conversation partner, Dr. Decety said.

“When you’re being mimicked in a good way, it communicates a kind of pleasure, a social high you’re getting from the other person, and I suspect it activates the areas of the brain involved in sensing reward,” he said.

Social mimicry can and does go wrong. At its malicious extreme, it curdles into mockery, which is why people often recoil when they catch of whiff of mimicry, ending any chance of a social bond. Preliminary studies suggest that the rules change if there is a wide cultural gap between two people. For almost everyone else, however, subtle mimicry comes across as a form of flattery, the physical dance of charm itself. And if that kind of flattery doesn’t close a deal, it may just be that the customer isn’t buying. Everyone has the right to be charmed but not seduced.



Reinventing Date Night for Long-Married Couples
Tara Parker-Pope, New York Times- 2/12/2008

But brain and behavior researchers say many couples are going about date night all wrong. Simply spending quality time together is probably not enough to prevent a relationship from getting stale.

Using laboratory studies, real-world experiments and even brain-scan data, scientists can now offer long-married couples a simple prescription for rekindling the romantic love that brought them together in the first place. The solution? Reinventing date night.

Rather than visiting the same familiar haunts and dining with the same old friends, couples need to tailor their date nights around new and different activities that they both enjoy, says Arthur Aron, a professor of social psychology at the State University of New York at Stony Brook. The goal is to find ways to keep injecting novelty into the relationship. The activity can be as simple as trying a new restaurant or something a little more unusual or thrilling — like taking an art class or going to an amusement park.

The theory is based on brain science. New experiences activate the brain’s reward system, flooding it with dopamine and norepinephrine. These are the same brain circuits that are ignited in early romantic love, a time of exhilaration and obsessive thoughts about a new partner. (They are also the brain chemicals involved in drug addiction and obsessive-compulsive disorder.)

Most studies of love and marriage show that the decline of romantic love over time is inevitable. The butterflies of early romance quickly flutter away and are replaced by familiar, predictable feelings of long-term attachment.

But several experiments show that novelty — simply doing new things together as a couple — may help bring the butterflies back, recreating the chemical surges of early courtship.

“We don’t really know what’s going on in the brain, but as you trigger and amp up this reward system in the brain that is associated with romantic love, it’s reasonable to suggest that it’s enabling you to feel more romantic love,” said the anthropologist Helen E. Fisher, of Rutgers, who has published several studies on the neural basis of romantic love. “You’re altering your brain chemistry.”

Over the past several years, Dr. Aron and his colleagues have tested the novelty theory in a series of experiments with long-married couples.

In one of the earliest studies, the researchers recruited 53 middle-aged couples. Using standard questionnaires, the researchers measured the couples’ relationship quality and then randomly assigned them to one of three groups.

One group was instructed to spend 90 minutes a week doing pleasant and familiar activities, like dining out or going to a movie. Couples in another group were instructed to spend 90 minutes a week on “exciting” activities that appealed to both husband and wife. Those couples did things they didn’t typically do — attending concerts or plays, skiing, hiking and dancing. The third group was not assigned any particular activity.

After 10 weeks, the couples again took tests to gauge the quality of their relationships. Those who had undertaken the “exciting” date nights showed a significantly greater increase in marital satisfaction than the “pleasant” date night group.

While the results were compelling, they weren’t conclusive. The experiment didn’t occur in a controlled setting, and numerous variables could have affected the final results.

More recently, Dr. Aron and colleagues have created laboratory experiments to test the effects of novelty on marriage. In one set of experiments, some couples are assigned a mundane task that involves simply walking back and forth across a room. Other couples, however, take part in a more challenging exercise — their wrists and ankles are bound together as they crawl back and forth pushing a ball.

Before and after the exercise, the couples were asked things like, “How bored are you with your current relationship?” The couples who took part in the more challenging and novel activity showed bigger increases in love and satisfaction scores, while couples performing the mundane task showed no meaningful changes.

Dr. Aron cautions that novelty alone is probably not enough to save a marriage in crisis. But for couples who have a reasonably good but slightly dull relationship, novelty may help reignite old sparks.

And recent brain-scan studies show that romantic love really can last years into a marriage. Last week, at the Society for Personality and Social Psychology conference in Albuquerque, researchers presented brain-scan data on several men and women who had been married for 10 or more years. Interviews and questionnaires suggested they were still intensely in love with their partners. Brain scans confirmed it, showing increased brain activity associated with romantic love when the subjects saw pictures of their spouses.

It’s not clear why some couples are able to maintain romantic intensity even after years together. But the scientists believe regular injections of novelty and excitement most likely play a role.

“You don’t have to swing from the chandeliers,” Dr. Fisher said. “Just go to a new part of a town, take a drive in the country or better yet, don’t make plans, and see what happens to you.”

Dr. DiFranza, who studies tobacco dependence, described a typical teenage smoker — a 14-year-old girl who smokes only occasionally, about three cigarettes a week. She admitted to having failed at several efforts to quit. Each time she tried, cravings and feelings of irritability drove her back to smoking.

“We have long assumed that kids got addicted because they were smoking 5 or 10 cigarettes a day,” Dr. DiFranza said in an interview. “Now we know that they risk addiction after trying a cigarette just once.”

He based this conclusion on the findings of a 10-item checklist he and colleagues devised to help people of all ages determine whether they were hooked on nicotine. He reported in the journal:

“Studies on a cohort of seventh graders found that every symptom on this validated checklist had been experienced by at least one young person within weeks of starting to smoke, sometimes after the first cigarette. These results have been replicated many times.

“Three New Zealand national surveys involving 25,722 adolescent smokers who used this checklist revealed a loss of autonomy in 25 percent to 30 percent of young people who had smoked their one and only cigarette during the preceding month.”

Why Teenagers Are Different
Even occasional teenage smokers can experience the same symptoms of nicotine withdrawal that prompt adult smokers to light up again and again.

Robin J. Mermelstein, director of the Center for Health Behavior Research at the University of Illinois in Chicago and a longtime researcher on smoking behavior, said in an interview that Dr. DiFranza’s message was important. But, Dr. Mermelstein added, “the vast majority of teenagers who try one or two cigarettes don’t go on to become smokers.”

“Some kids experience withdrawal symptoms earlier than others,” she continued. “We still need to know how to predict who’s going to get hooked.”

Dr. DiFranza explained that a phenomenon called “dependence-related tolerance — how long after smoking a cigarette you can go before you need to smoke another one” — was long thought to be the same for adolescents and adults. But recent studies have shown that the brains of adolescents can become tolerant to nicotine after smoking fewer cigarettes than one a day, and it is tolerance that then drives them to smoke more often.

“The typical adult smoker begins to crave the next cigarette in 45 minutes to an hour after smoking,” he said. “But kids can be addicted and not need to smoke again for days, even weeks.”

Some adult smokers are no different from teenagers. One study found that adults who smoked only a few cigarettes a week found it hard to quit. “They experienced withdrawal symptoms, which some rated as unbearable,” Dr. DiFranza reported. “Most of these self-described ‘social smokers’ were addicted to tobacco.”

These findings come at a time when the once steady decline in teenage smoking has leveled off, antismoking ads on television have all but disappeared and smoking in movies has risen to a near all-time high.

“Well over a dozen studies have shown that kids who watch movies with smoking are more likely to smoke,” Dr. DiFranza said. “Smoking in movies is more common now than it was in the 1950s and ’60s, whereas smoking among adults is half as common now as it was then. Movie producers are not reflecting real life.”

Teenage smoking had been declining steadily from peak levels reached in the mid-1990s through 2004, but the rate of decline decelerated during that period, and in 2005 it halted among eighth graders, the bellwether of smoking trends among teenagers. Today, about 13 percent of teenagers smoke at least once a month.

Studies in rats at Duke University revealed how a single cigarette could keep withdrawal symptoms at bay for far longer than the 12 hours it takes for nicotine to be eliminated from the body. The first dose of nicotine increased production of the neurotransmitter noradrenaline in a part of the brain called the hippocampus for at least 30 days after the nicotine was gone. Another Duke study found an increase in nicotine receptors in the brain the day after the animals got their first dose of nicotine.

“The take-home message: It only takes a day for the brain to remodel itself in response to one dose of nicotine,” Dr. DiFranza wrote. “About one-quarter of young people experience a sensation of relaxation the first time they inhale from a cigarette, and this sensation predicts continued smoking.”

Further evidence of how easily youngsters become addicted to nicotine comes from studies of quit rates among adolescent smokers. In one typical study, 40 percent of adolescents who tried to quit relapsed in one week or less; only 3 percent remained abstinent a year later.

New Strategies Needed
These findings suggest that new, more forceful strategies are needed to combat smoking by youngsters, which typically leads to a lifetime of smoking. More than 90 percent of adult smokers report that they started smoking as adolescents.

Dr. DiFranza maintains that “public health initiatives are most helpful.” These include raising the price of cigarettes, a strategy that helped reduce the smoking rate in New York City; a well-enforced nationwide effort to get retailers to stop selling cigarettes to minors; a wider ban on smoking in public places, especially those frequented by teenagers, like restaurants, video game parlors and bowling alleys; mass media campaigns, including broad use by the states of the tobacco industry’s payout to sponsor antismoking commercials; and pressure on the movie industry to make films smoke-free. He urged parents, including those who smoke themselves, to emphasize to their children that “it’s a huge mistake to start smoking. If they never start, they’ll never have to worry about quitting.”

Man Is Sought in New York Psychologist’s Stabbing
Al Baker, New York Times- 2/13/2008

Armed with a suitcase full of knives, an unidentified middle-aged man unleashed a rampage of violence inside the offices of an Upper East Side psychiatry practice on Tuesday night, fatally stabbing and slashing a well-known psychologist before wounding her colleague when he tried to come to her aid, officials said on Wednesday. The assailant had not been identified as of Wednesday afternoon, the police said, though investigators were pursuing a theory that he was either a patient at the suite of offices, at 435 East 79th Street, or that he had some kind of ties to the establishment or the services it provided.
      Originally, the assailant had arrived at the offices, about 8 p.m. on Tuesday, asking to visit Dr. Kent T. Shinbach, 70, a psychiatrist there, the police said. But at some point he disappeared inside the office of another counselor there, Kathryn Faughey, 56, the police said. There, he unleashed a barrage of violence, fatally stabbing Dr. Faughey. At some point, when Dr. Shinbach heard the attack and went to the office of his colleague, the assailant turned on him and Dr. Shinbach was seriously injured, officials said.
     The scene was marked by blood and upended furniture, the police and neighbors said. “We could see in the office where the blinds had been ripped off and were hanging at a strange angle and the entire office was in disarray,” said Alexandra Pike, 20, a student who could see into the office where the attack occurred from the window of her apartment across the street. “Papers were strewn around and there was overturned furniture. And it was clear there was some kind of scuffle.”
     It is unclear what the man’s motive was, and Police Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly released a sketch of the suspect after a news conference at 1 Police Plaza on Wednesday, saying detectives were seeking him. The sketch was based on descriptions provided to detectives of those who saw the man in the moments before the attack — including the surviving victim — but who could not identify him by name. “Obviously there is a forensic evidence aspect to this case,” Mr. Kelly said. “We’re getting information from the doctor and other medical professionals in the suite to determine if they have any information to add as the investigation goes forward.” He added: “We’re fully engaged on several fronts.”
     Mr. Kelly described the assailant as a man in his 40’s, about 5 feet 9 inches, with brownish or blond hair. He was wearing a three-quarter length green coat, with sneakers and a baseball cap, said Mr. Kelly, as he held up the sketch before a bank of television cameras.
     The first sign of the man’s entrance at the building was captured on videotape —as he walked in the front door about 8 p.m., passed by a doorman and went into the counselors’ suite of offices, the police said. He was inside for about an hour: A videotape showed him leaving through a basement door about 8:54 p.m., the police said, and it showed a view of him from his back.
     Blood was found on the door — a panic door that locks on its own when it shuts — indicating the assailant might have been wounded. Before he fled, the assailant left two suitcases in the basement. Inside one was assorted women’s clothing — some shoes, a top, as well as diapers for adults. He other had about eight knives, the police said. Upstairs in the room of Ms. Faughey, investigators found three other weapons, including two knives and a cleaver with a broken handle, the police said. A female patient was in the lobby of the counselors’ suite when the assailant showed up, the police said. She apparently left before the attack on Dr. Faughey became known, but detectives tracked her down and interviewed her, the police said. Dr. Shinbach was also interviewed after undergoing surgery at New York Hospital/Weill Cornell Medical Center.

Friend Is Questioned for Eight Hours in Killing of Therapist
Al Baker, New York Times- 2/15/2008

Detectives investigating the killing of an Upper East Side therapist dug through her e-mail messages, telephone records and paper files, officials said Thursday, as they followed several potential paths to finding her killer. A Pennsylvania man who knew the victim — and exchanged recent e-mail messages and telephone calls with her — was interviewed by detectives for up to eight hours, officials said.
      Investigators increasingly believe that the victim, Dr. Kathryn Faughey, was the intended victim, even though the killer asked a doorman for her office suite mate, Dr. Kent D. Shinbach, before attacking the woman in her East 79th Street office Tuesday. They are focusing on the theory that the attacker was not a patient of the victim, but someone she knew outside her professional life, or even a relative, spouse, lover or acquaintance of a patient, officials said.
     Detectives have found two suitcases the assailant left behind in the office. One held women’s fluffy slippers and a blouse, as well as disposable diapers for adults; the other had eight knives, three lengths of rope and duct tape. The crime scene provided a trove of forensic evidence: blood at the scene was being collected and analyzed, traces of the attacker’s DNA were being sought and detectives were trying to gather fingerprints and fibers. One of the suitcases was expandable, suggesting to at least some investigators that the attacker intended to kidnap the victim and leave with her in the suitcase.
     The case has alarmed Manhattan’s mental health community and made armchair detectives of many because it seems, on the surface, such a mystery. It was the e-mail messages that led to the most fast-moving developments Thursday. One e-mail exchange — the most recent ones from a day before the killing — and telephone calls linked a Pennsylvania man, William Kunsman, to Dr. Faughey, law enforcement officials said. Mr. Kunsman, a musician who had met Dr. Faughey and her husband, Walter Adam, at guitar camp six years ago, was picked up at 4:30 a.m. at his home in Coplay, Pa., on Thursday, the officials said.
     He went voluntarily to the State Police barracks for Troop M in Bethlehem, Pa., where detectives from New York City met them, the officials said. One investigator said Mr. Kunsman was cooperative at first and even voluntarily provided police with a sample of his DNA. At about 1 p.m., Mr. Kunsman asked for a lawyer and the questioning ceased, the officials said.
     Photographs of him were shown to Dr. Shinbach and a woman who had been in his office on the night of the slaying, said a law enforcement official who had been briefed. The woman did not identify Mr. Kunsman as the attacker, but Dr. Shinbach did, law enforcement officials said. The e-mail messages Dr. Faughey exchanged with Mr. Kunsman dealt not with any romantic issues, officials said, but with practical problems Mr. Kunsman was having, possibly over losing his job and his health insurance, officials said.
     When asked if Mr. Kunsman was a suspect, Paul J. Browne, the Police Department’s chief spokesman, declined to answer, saying only that he had been questioned in connection with the murder.
     At about 5 p.m. on Thursday — after he left the barracks — Mr. Kunsman held an impromptu news conference from the front porch of his tan, wood-sided bungalow home on Quarry Street in Coplay to express his innocence and speak of his mourning for Dr. Faughey, whom he called his friend. “Y’all shouldn’t be here today,” he said to the reporters outside his home. “I had nothing to do with what happened to Kathryn.”
     Mr. Kunsman said he did not have a lawyer. He declined to discuss what the detectives asked him, saying he did not want to jeopardize their investigation. “They were doing their job,” he said. “They were very thorough about doing their job. I couldn’t possibly have been in New York City at the time.” He added: “It’s a lot to digest in one day. I found out my good friend is gone. I’m grieving. It’s just been a hell of an ordeal.”
     Some investigators said a series of details brought Mr. Kunsman to the attention of detectives: He had met Dr. Faughey and Mr. Adam at the guitar camp; his name came up in Dr. Faughey’s e-mail record; the adult disposable diapers found at the scene — sold in relatively few places — had been delivered to one store in Coplay. One investigator said that Mr. Kunsman had recently been seen around Dr. Faughey’s office, at 435 East 79th Street, off York Avenue, though another investigator questioned the veracity of that account, calling it a rumor.
     But Mr. Kunsman did not fit the description of the attacker the police had been given by witnesses, nor the characteristics of the man seen in videotaped images entering the suite of offices shortly after 8 p.m. on Tuesday, and leaving some 59 minutes later. He appeared to have a fuller head of hair than the man the witnesses described, and the one on the videotape has a bald spot.
     The female patient who had been in Dr. Shinbach’s office, whom police did not identify by name, confronted the assailant after he had attacked both doctors, the police said. When the assailant came out, bloodied, he tried to force her into a bathroom, but she kneed him in the groin and then locked the door to the suite of offices as he fled to the basement, officials said. After the assailant attacked Dr. Shinbach, he took his wallet and read the address from his driver’s license back to him, to make it clear that he could find him, officials said.
     Dr. Faughey’s husband said he did not believe Mr. Kunsman, whom he called “a very close family friend,” was a suspect in his wife’s death. He said he and his wife had “met about 400 to 500 people at get-togethers where we play guitar.” But he said no one stood out in his mind from those meetings. “I looked at the video,” Mr. Adam said of the videotape images. “That was not my recollection of what he looked like, but the video was poor." Mr. Adam said none of his wife’s patients were referred to her from the courts or criminal justice system, but through conventional professional channels.
     Early Thursday afternoon, investigators took evidence from the doctors’ office wrapped in paper. One piece was a chair, and another had a biohazard sticker affixed to it. Other items were brought out in large and small evidence bags, and three big white boxes were also carried out.
     Investigators were wading through lists of Dr. Faughey’s patients’ names. But the investigators have had to grapple with medical privacy laws in trying to gain access to her patient records. It remained unclear whether the police would seek a court order to overcome that legal hurdle.

A Call to Action
Within a six-week period in 2002, three Special Forces sergeants returned from Afghanistan and murdered their wives at Fort Bragg in North Carolina. Two immediately turned their guns on themselves; the third hanged himself in a jail cell. A fourth soldier at the same Army base also killed his wife during those six weeks.
     At the beginning of this wartime period, the cluster of murder-suicides set off alarms about the possible link between combat tours and domestic violence, a link supported by a study published that year in the journal Military Medicine. The killings also reinvigorated the concerns about military domestic violence that had led to the formation of the Defense Task Force on Domestic Violence two years earlier.
     National attention to the subject was short-lived. But an examination by The Times found more than 150 cases of fatal domestic violence or child abuse in the United States involving service members and new veterans during the wartime period that began in October 2001 with the invasion of Afghanistan. In more than a third of the cases, The Times determined that the offenders had deployed to Afghanistan or Iraq or to the regions in support of those missions. In another third, it determined that the offenders never deployed to war. And the deployment history of the final third could not be ascertained.
     The military tracks only homicides that it prosecutes, and a majority of killings involving service members are handled by civilian authorities. To track these cases, The Times used records from the Army, Air Force and Navy — the Marines did not provide any information —and local news reports. It is difficult to know how complete The Times’s findings are. What is clear, though, is that these homicides occurred at a time when the military was trying to improve its handling of domestic violence.
     The Pentagon’s domestic violence task force, appointed in April 2000 and comprising 24 military and civilian experts, met regularly for three years to examine a system where, they found, soldiers rarely faced punishment or prosecution for battering their wives and where they often found shelter from civilian orders of protection. When the moment arrived to explain their findings and recommendations to Congress, however, the timing could not have been poorer. Deborah D. Tucker and Lt. Gen. Garry L. Parks of the Marines, the leaders of the task force, presented their final report to the House Armed Services Committee on the very day that the Iraq war began, March 20, 2003. Ms. Tucker called it “one of the more surreal experiences of my life.” “Periodically, members of the committee would call for a break and there would be some updated information provided on the status of our troops’ entry into Iraq and how far they’d gotten,” she said. “There was a map on an easel to the side.” “I knew that while we were at war all other considerations would push back,” she added, “and I hoped that Operation Iraqi Freedom would be a quick matter on the order of Desert Storm.”
     The task force was disbanded, and its request to reconvene after two years to evaluate progress was rejected. But the Defense Department embraced most of its 200 recommendations and gradually made many changes, from the increase in advocates to domestic violence training for commanding officers. “The services have taken huge strides to implement the recommendations,” said David Lloyd, director of the Pentagon’s Family Advocacy Program, starting with sending out “a strong message across the department that domestic violence is not acceptable.” Further, after the killings at Fort Bragg, Congress passed a law that made civilian orders of protection binding on military bases, and the Army gradually slowed the transition from war to home to help soldiers adjust.
     Mr. Lloyd said he could not verify or comment on The Times’s findings on domestic killings. But, he said, domestic fatalities do not provide a complete picture of the incidence of domestic violence in the military. “You have a pie, a nine-inch shell, and you have a slice of that pie, but there are other slices: verbal abuse and psychological control and assault that didn’t result in a homicide,” Mr. Lloyd said. “Even if the fatality slice has increased and it would look larger, the other numbers have gone down.”
     According to the military, the number of general spouse and child abuse incidents reported to on-base family advocacy programs began declining in 1998, before the special effort to address the issue began, and continued to decline significantly through 2006. But whether those numbers reflect a genuine decline is a matter of debate, given that large numbers of service members have spent considerable time away on deployments and that the strengthening of sanctions for domestic violence has made some women more reluctant to report abuse.
     The accuracy of the military’s domestic violence data has also been questioned, by advocates, the Government Accountability Office and military officials themselves. Last fall, in a statement released during domestic violence awareness month, Mike Hoskins, a Pentagon official, said, “We shouldn’t necessarily take comfort in reduced rates of violence.” He said they probably reflected “good news” but urged caution in interpreting the numbers.
     Dr. Campbell, the former task force member, said the task force had recommended periodic anonymous surveys to ascertain the full extent of domestic violence. She also said that she believed the “true incidence” of domestic violence had probably increased as a result of service members returning from Iraq with combat trauma, which can exacerbate family violence. “It’s sort of like, on the one hand, they’re improving the system, and on the other hand, they’re stressing it,” she said. Others agree, noting that wartime places a burden on the military as a whole, even on those who do not deploy to combat zones but absorb additional duties at home.
     Christine Hansen, executive director of the Miles Foundation, which provides domestic violence assistance mostly to the wives of officers and senior enlisted men, said the organization’s caseload had tripled since the war in Iraq began. And John P. Galligan, a retired Army colonel who served as a military judge at Fort Hood and now represents military clients in private practice, said he, too, had seen a “substantial” increase in military domestic violence cases in his area. “Sometimes I just sit and scratch my head,” he said.
     The separation of deployment, in and of itself, often causes marital strains. “Even with a healthy marriage, there is a massive adjustment,” said Anita Gorecki, a lawyer and former Army captain who represents soldiers near Fort Bragg and is married to an officer currently in Iraq. “Add on to that combat stress and injuries and sometimes it can create the perfect storm.”
     Some researchers draw a fairly firm connection between post-traumatic stress disorder and domestic violence. A 2006 study in The Journal of Marital and Family Therapy looked at veterans who sought marital counseling at a Veterans Affairs medical center in the Midwest between 1997 and 2003. Those given a diagnosis of PTSD were “significantly more likely to perpetrate violence toward their partners,” the study found, with more than 80 percent committing at least one act of violence in the previous year, and almost half at least one severe act.
     Pamela Iles, a superior court judge who was permitted by the Marines to set up a privately financed domestic violence education program at Camp Pendleton in California, views much of the domestic abuse on the base as “collateral” from the war. She sees the domestic violence committed by marines, many of them young, as a reaction to jumping back and forth between the dangers of war and the trouble at home. “One minute you are in Baghdad waiting for a bomb to go off and the next minute you are in Burger King,” Judge Iles said. “There is a lot of disorientation.”

A 9-Year-Old Witness
It was a little before dawn on Feb. 20, 2006, in a bedroom in Edwardsville, Ill. Carol Trevino and her 9-year-old son, sleeping deeply after watching “Wayne’s World,” were startled awake by a series of booms. “What was that?” Carol Trevino asked her son. In seconds, Sgt. Jon Trevino, her estranged husband, barged through the door, according to a police report. Mrs. Trevino had just enough time to reach for her pepper spray before he shot her five times, the last time in the head. Then he shot himself.
     Their son, wide-eyed, sat in bed watching his life explode, bullet by bullet. Few details escaped the boy’s notice. His father used a silver gun and it “didn’t have a wheel on it, like the cowboys used,” he told the Edwardsville police. The boy could even name the precise time of his mother’s death: 4:32 a.m., as the glowing clock read. Outside in Mr. Trevino’s car was the immediate motive for the murder-suicide: divorce papers, evidence of a marriage destabilized by multiple deployments to war zones and by Sergeant Trevino’s own increasing instability.
     T. Robert Cook, his brother-in-law, said he believed Sergeant Trevino’s domestic violence was triggered by his combat trauma. “I’m 100 percent sure it was the war,” said Mr. Cook, who is raising the Trevinos’ son along with his wife, Cheryl Lee, who is Carol’s sister. “I don’t have any doubt their marital problems placed a burden on him, but I am quite sure that, but for the war, he would have taken a different approach. When you see people being shot every day, death is not a big thing.”
     Sergeant Trevino, who had endured childhood sexual abuse and a difficult first marriage, suffered psychiatric problems long before he was dispatched to war zones to perform the highly stressful job of evacuating the wounded. And the Air Force knew it. Air Force mental health records show that Sergeant Trevino, who was 36, had been treated twice for mental health problems before the war: once in 1995 for serious depression as his first marriage crumbled, and then in 1999 for post-traumatic stress disorder stemming from the childhood abuse and marital problems with his new wife, Carol. He was counseled and treated with medication both times.
     As a result of these problems, the Air Force insisted that he secure a medical waiver for a promotion that he sought to become an aeromedical evacuation technician. And military doctors certified that he could handle the job, despite research that shows that pre-existing post-traumatic stress disorder is exacerbated in a war zone. Col. Steven Pflanz, a senior psychiatrist in the Air Force, who was not involved in the Trevino case, said the Air Force considered the stress disorder to be treatable and therefore was willing to deploy an airman with a history of it. But the decision is not taken lightly, he said. “It’s not an exact science,” he said. “You try to make your best prediction. We spend a lot of time with our customers.”
     In Sergeant Trevino’s case, the prediction was wrong. He had trouble shaking off the carnage that he experienced so viscerally while evacuating injured service members. After one deployment to Afghanistan and two to Iraq, his mental health and his marriage deteriorated. When he returned from his second tour in Iraq, Sergeant Trevino acknowledged in a health assessment that he had “serious problems” dealing with the people he loved and that he was feeling “down, helpless, panicky or anxious.”
     The Air Force acted quickly. He was abruptly restricted from “special operational duty.” An Air Force doctor diagnosed “acute PTSD,” calling it a reaction to the war and marital problems. Sergeant Trevino began taking a cocktail of antidepressants and underwent therapy. According to doctors’ notes, he did not express thoughts of homicide or suicide. By the time Hurricane Katrina hit the Gulf Coast in August 2005, he was considered well enough to be deployed domestically.
     But his wife’s family, which had taken him under its wing, found the once affable, quick-witted sergeant to be profoundly altered. His temper flashed unpredictably, white-hot. He acted threatened and paranoid, his behavior so erratic that he frightened his son. One late night, he took his son on a rambling drive to nowhere, ranting to the boy about his mother. At least one time, he struck his wife. A friend gave Carol Trevino the pepper spray that she reached for the night of her murder. But she never considered his abuse serious enough to report him to the authorities. Four days before the murder-suicide, Sergeant Trevino bought a gun. “This is just one of those things that unfortunately happens,” he wrote to his son in a suicide note. “I love you, and I know I let you down.”

Justice Delayed
The Pentagon task force had one overarching recommendation: that the military work hard to effect a “culture shift” to zero tolerance for domestic violence by holding offenders accountable and by punishing criminal behavior. There was, members believed, a core credo that needed to be attacked frontally: “this notion that the good soldier either can’t be a wife beater or, if they are, that it’s a temporary aberration that shouldn’t interfere with them doing military service,” as Dr. Campbell put it.
     The way the military handled several cases involving the deaths of babies and toddlers indicates that this kind of thinking has been difficult to demolish at a time of war. In October 2003, four months after Jose Aguilar, 24, a Marine Corps sergeant, returned from the initial invasion of Iraq, his infant son, Damien, wound up in the intensive care unit of a local hospital with bleeding in his brain and eyes.
     Sergeant Aguilar, a mechanic based at Camp Lejeune in North Carolina, acknowledged to the local police that he had been rough with the 2-month-old baby, shaking Damien to stop him from squirming during a diaper change. He said that he had been abused himself as a child and that he did not mean to hurt the baby. After the marine was charged with felony child abuse, he and his wife completed a parenting program.
     The following summer, while the felony charge was pending, Sergeant Aguilar was deployed once more to Iraq, this time for nine months. His court case was delayed, which did not surprise local prosecutors. Michael Maultsby, the assistant district attorney in Onslow County, N.C., who prosecuted Sergeant Aguilar, said that such frustrating delays in justice sometimes occur in his county, home to Camp Lejeune. “It depends on the needs of the unit,” Mr. Maultsby said. “We can’t overrule them.”
     In April 2006, a year after Sergeant Aguilar returned from Iraq but before his felony case was resolved, Damien, who by then was 2, died of a brain injury. His father claimed that the boy had been injured by a fall in the bathtub. The medical examiner disputed that explanation. The marine was arrested, pleaded guilty to second-degree murder and felony child abuse, and was sentenced last fall to 28 to 35 years in prison.
     Marine officials would not comment on individual cases. Elaine Woodhouse, a Marine Corps social services program specialist, said that “the family advocacy program does not recommend or advise deployment of a marine when domestic or felony child abuse charges are pending.” Still, that decision, she said, is left to the discretion of the commanders.
     A conviction for domestic violence, unlike pending charges, almost always renders a service member ineligible to go to war, but that restriction has not always been considered binding, as is clear in the case of Sergeant Terrasas, who was stationed at Camp Pendleton. One night in late December 2002, Sergeant Terrasas, drunk and angry over a telephone conversation about the looming war in Iraq, vented his anger by punching his wife, Lucia, in the face. “He seemed to just lose it,” Mrs. Terrasas told the police in Oceanside, Calif., who arrested him on misdemeanor charges.
     But Sergeant Terrasas was deployed to Iraq before his case was heard. It was not until his return seven months later that he pleaded guilty, was placed on probation and was ordered to complete a 16-week batterers intervention program run by the Marine Corps. Sergeant Terrasas attended a few classes. But the Marine Corps, facing a runaway insurgency in Iraq, pulled him out of the batterers program and shipped him off to war for a second time in early 2004.
     This deployment was illegal. A 1996 law bans offenders who are convicted of domestic violence misdemeanors from carrying firearms, with no special exception for military personnel. The ban is referred to as the Lautenberg amendment after its sponsor, Senator Frank R. Lautenberg, Democrat of New Jersey. Army and Marine regulations, formulated in response to the weapons ban, explicitly prohibit deployments for missions that require firearms, and extend the policy to felony domestic violence offenders, too. The Marine Corps would not comment on Sergeant Terrasas’s deployment, citing confidentiality rules.
     When Sergeant Terrasas returned from war, he completed his batterers program, said his lawyer, Philip De Massa. But his anger, tested by two tours in Iraq, still surfaced. In September 2005, when the police responded to a domestic argument, he broke down crying and told one officer that he suffered from “postwar traumatic syndrome.” There is no record that he sought or received mental health help.
     Nearly two weeks later, the Terrasases’ 7-month-old son, Alexander, died from a powerful blow to the head. Mr. Terrasas was charged with murder. Last August, after a deal with prosecutors, he was sentenced to seven years in prison for felony child endangerment. He never admitted to abusing his child.

Broken Promises
Sgt. Erin Edwards, emboldened by a year in Iraq, returned to Texas with the courage to end her troubled marriage. “Being apart for such a long period of time enabled her to realize she could survive without him,” said Sgt. Jami Howell, 28, who was her best friend. When Erin Edwards told her husband that she wanted a divorce after four years of marriage, he responded as she had long feared. On June 19, 2004, he followed her to their baby sitter’s house to hand her a written proposal for a custody arrangement. When she did not immediately respond, he beat her so badly that she wound up in the emergency room.
     Even before the assault, William Edwards’s troubles had so badly affected his performance at work that his commanding officer, Capt. Brian Novoselich, took the time to meet with him weekly to check on his welfare. After the assault, it was the captain who confined him to the base. But William Edwards repeatedly left unescorted and often stayed with his brother, who lived across the street from Erin Edwards in Killeen. On several occasions, she alerted the police and his superiors that he was lurking.
     On July 21, 2004, Erin Edwards went to court to make the temporary protection order permanent. At the hearing, William Edwards told the judge that he had enrolled in alcohol and domestic violence classes after the June assault, according to a transcript. “I had hit rock bottom when I touched my wife, man,” he said in court. “That was the worst day ever in my life. I had always told my wife that I would never touch her, ever, physically.” William Edwards also acknowledged that when the police showed up that day, he begged his wife not to press charges, saying: “Don’t do this to my career. Don’t do this.”
     Erin Edwards spoke of the effect on their children, who witnessed the assault. “Since the incident happened, all my son talks about is how his father hurt his mother, and that ‘Daddy is going to kill Mommy,’” she said. She also stated, and her husband learned for the first time, that she was transferring and moving with the children. William Edwards was “visibly upset” by this, according to Army documents turned over to the police.
     The following morning, after reporting to an exercise session with other soldiers, William Edwards left the base alone one final time. After the murder-suicide, local police officers securing the scene noted that both bodies were dressed in military camouflage clothing with nameplates that said Edwards. Both were 24.
     At Erin Edwards’s funeral, her boss, Brig. Gen. Charles Benjamin Allen, who was killed in a helicopter crash in late 2004, eulogized the soldier with a cracking voice. More than three years later, her relatives note that not even he, with his high rank, was able to ensure that the military was doing more than taking a troubled soldier “at his word,” as Mary Lou Taylor, Erin’s aunt, said. “He couldn’t or failed to help her be safe,” Ms. Taylor said.
     William Edwards’s former commanding officer, Major Novoselich, said in a recent interview that he was “shocked by the end result.” Now a professor at West Point, he said he had assumed that William Edwards’s immediate supervisors were monitoring him. Near Fort Hood, Detective Brank of the Killeen police said soldiers continued to defy restrictions to the base. “I am surprised,” she said. “Fort Hood is not enforcing these orders.” The Army examined Erin Edwards’s death as part of a fatality review program recommended by the Pentagon task force “to ensure no victim dies in vain.”
     A one-paragraph summary of the review seemed to discount the findings of the civilian police investigation. The summary noted that Erin Edwards had refused the assistance of the base’s family advocacy program, while William Edwards had enrolled in it. It added that William Edwards had “appeared to comply” with his restrictions. Until the day he “eluded his military escort” and killed his wife.