Bob CollinsAt last night’s debate, Democratic presidential contender Bernie Sanders perfectly illustrated why efforts to improve the lives of people with mental illness run into so many roadblocks: It’s still ‘OK’ to make fun of them.
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MPR News Reflections and observations on the news
Health
In our growing collection, we’ve read plenty of powerful essays on the nature of mental health, depression, and suicide, but we’re hard pressed to recall one as powerful as that for Aletha Pinnow, who took her own life in Duluth last month.
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North of Thunder Bay, Ontario yesterday, Norman Shewaybick kept a promise to his wife. He would drag an oxygen tank on a toboggan more than 300 miles, an oxygen tank that would have saved her life had the nursing station not run out. Read more →
Here’s today’s moments of bittersweetness, parental-guilt edition. Read more →
In the waning days of Black History Month, Debi Thomas should get a little attention for proving, as she did at the 1988 Olympics, that an African American can succeed at figure skating while acing college exams. Read more →
The decision to shutter Al Jazeera America recently was met with a general shoulder shrug. It was hard to find the channel on cable TV. It was easy to find its website, but not enough people were interested in finding it. Read more →
What causes people to behave like such fools whenever they step into an aluminum tube?
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By the way, the Midwest (46%) has the largest percentage of parental deadbeats when it comes to rewarding kids for losing teeth. Read more →
Joshua Meyrs, 29, walked into a busy intersection, hoping a car would hit him. But a stranger stopped her car, brought him to it, and started talking to him. Read more →
Utility player Mike Aviles said his daughter, Adriana, underwent a bone marrow transplant in December and is now cancer free. Read more →
It was a class act that gripped the gym in Annandale, Minn., on Monday night.
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A Pine County farmer’s plight shows the value of reading the fine print when signing up for health insurance under Minnesota’s version of Medicaid, known as Medical Assistance.
Scott Killerud, of Willow River, signed up for health insurance through MNsure, and found out his income qualified him for Medical Assistance, the Duluth News Tribune reports.
They’ve found out since then that the state has placed liens on their estate to pay for it.
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We don’t know exactly what happened inside a Roseville apartment overnight where a man having a mental health crisis was shot to death after stabbing a police dog.
But based on the information provided so far, it’s worth discussing whether there’s a more effective way to respond to these situations. Read more →
Since late January, a man in Superior, Wis., has been protesting the local school’s “de-escalation room”, a room where some of the school’s special needs students can go when things get tense for them. Read more →
The rush to stem the heroin problem as a health problem reflects the new whiteness of the crisis. Read more →