According to a recent news release from the Brattleboro Retreat, the facility saw its admissions jump by a record 23 percent in 2010.
Officials at the Retreat, a nonprofit, regional specialty psychiatric hospital and addictions treatment center, attribute the spike in admissions to an increase in depression caused by economic stress, increased abuse of prescription drugs, and the launch of a series of new services and programs.
The Retreat provided in-patient care for nearly 3,000 adults and adolescents in 2010, with as many as 24 new admissions per day. That's the most in the facility's 177-year history. The average in-patient stay last year at the Retreat ranged from 6.5 to 14.8 days.
Nationally, psychiatric hospitals saw an admissions increase of about 3.5 percent, according to the National Association of Psychiatric Health Systems (NAPHS).
Although the proposal to strip the Vermont Legislature of its statutory role regarding continued operation of Vermont Yankee (House bill 331, “An act relating to removing the requirement of legislative approval of continued operation of a nuclear power plant”) has no real chance of passing , it still is...
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The most frightening thing for people in the middle of a mental health crisis is that they often cannot hear or understand what is happening around them. If a person is mentally ill, not taking his or her medication, and confused, it can exacerbate a crisis. For police officers called to a scene involving a person in crisis, it can be difficult to accurately assess the circumstances. The police must try to gauge the situation based on unknown factors. With...
Flush from last fall's state spelling bee victory, the students at NewBrook Elementary School in Newfane are not resting on their laurels. For the second straight year, sixth-grader William Jagiello, 12, of Williamsville, went to St. Michael's College in Colchester on March 16 to compete at the state level in the Scripps National Spelling Bee. In finishing sixth in the competition, the tall, alert, and pleasantly self-confident Jagiello surpassed the high goal he had set for himself this year. “I...
When I was younger, I fully supported physician-assisted suicide for terminally ill people. I believed that people who are dying should be able to decide when and how the end arrives, and that physicians should be able to make the process as painless and as dignified as possible. After all, isn't the decision to end one's life a personal one? Doesn't the right of self-determination dictate that one should have control over deciding the manner of one's death? If physician-assisted...
Brooks Memorial Library's Fine Arts Committee will host an exhibit of approximately 18 posters from a collection donated to the library in 1994 by the family of Dr. and Mrs. Jacob Fagelman. The posters will be on display for the month of April in the library's Main Room. The entire collection comprises 40 posters containing images and text about the persecution and extermination of European Jews by Nazi Germany during the period of 1933–1945. The posters are part of a...
As an elder law attorney in Brattleboro, I read with great interest Gary Grinnell's March 9 piece, “Disappeared.” He equates nursing homes to prisons and states that each year thousands of family homes are sold to pay Medicaid liens by the big companies that own the nursing homes. While serious abuses take place nationwide in nursing homes, in this area we are fortunate to have several excellent facilities, mostly nonprofit, with compassionate staff who work hard. Although most of us...
Going to “The Aud” is the goal for every small town high school basketball player in Vermont. For the second-seeded Leland & Gray Rebels, getting a chance to play a Division III semifinal game at Barre Auditorium was the culmination of a dream. But as senior guard Colin Nystrom said after the Rebels beat Lake Region on March 11, they weren't going to let the bright lights distract them. After all, many of the players on the basketball team -
On Sunday, March 27, at 3 p.m., under the star-studded canopy of the Latchis Theatre, the Windham Orchestra will present Gustav Holst's The Planets. The orchestra, led by Music Director Hugh Keelan, will present two concepts of “space” - outer space, represented by Holst's enduringly popular orchestral suite, and acoustic space, represented by the late Bennington College composer Henry Brant's work On the Nature of Things. Johann Strauss II's electrifying Thunder & Lightning Polka will bring the audience solidly back...
What do you get when you combine a hilarious, farcical script by an internationally acclaimed playwright with a talented and ambitious cast of versatile area actors and an experienced and creative local director? You get the Vermont Theatre Company's next hit production, Lend Me A Tenor by Ken Ludwig, which will be presented March 25 through April 3 at the Evening Star Grange in Dummerston Center. Filled with belly laughs and slapstick action, this show has everything audiences need to...
There won't be a magnitude-9.0 earthquake and a tsunami in Vernon anytime soon. It's unlikely that we will see a nuclear disaster at the Vermont Yankee nuclear power plant on the scale of what we're seeing in at the Fukushima Daiichi complex in Japan. But earthquakes aren't as big a threat as more prosaic disasters, such as floods and hurricanes. Seventy-five years ago this month, massive flooding took place on the Connecticut River. The combination of the abnormally snowy winter...
Music • Youth Music Night at Head Room Stages: A youth music night, “The Revival,” organized by Youth Services, is taking place at Headroom Stages (formerly The Tinderbox) at 17 Elliot St., Brattleboro on Friday, March 25, from 6-10 p.m. Designed to give youth ages 15-21 a place to gather, this substance free event will be headlined by the Southern Vermont heavy rock band Atlatl, known for their high energy live performances. Swamp Queen and the Little Piggies of Brattleboro,
By this time next year, the Vermont Yankee nuclear power plant in Vernon will either continue churning out the megawatts, or it will go dark. But in the meantime, across the Pacific Ocean in Japan, engineers work tirelessly to prevent a meltdown at the six nuclear reactors in Fukushima which were damaged by a 8.9-magnitude earthquake. Vermont Yankee and the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power station were both built in the early 1970s and both share the same General Electric-designed Mark...
Recently in Texas, an 11-year-old girl was gang raped by 18 to 20 boys and men. Imagining the horror this child experienced is, in itself, just sickening. Any compassionate being would feel nauseous with the images it brings up. As abhorrent as this act is, the response of members of her community, as reported by The New York Times, was shocking. According to the March 8 account in the newspaper, “They said she dressed older than her age, wearing makeup...
The Brattleboro Fire Department can replace its 1970s-era fire truck, but residents will have to get their recycling act together on their own by December. Town Meeting members gathered for the annual Representative Town Meeting on Saturday, and out of the 140 members, 122 gathered to vote on 29 articles ranging from approving the school and municipal budgets, to extending the town recycling coordinators' contract by seven months. Most of the warned articles passed with an overwhelming majority and some...
Recently, more than 100 concerned Vermont citizens co-signed a letter to Sen. Bernie Sanders, asking him to lead the Senate in cutting $85 billion that the Obama administration promised to spend, over the next 10 years, on “modernizing” our thermonuclear weapons arsenal. The $85 billion was a bribe the President agreed to pay in exchange for Republican votes required to pass the New START treaty with Russia. The letter to Sanders noted that “we support the treaty's verification provisions. We...
Right on red for downtown seems penny wise and pound foolish to me. The three affected intersections are High, Elliot, and Flat streets. With no right on red, those wishing to turn right onto Main from High or Elliot have two phases where they can do so. • The right-arrow phase (when northbound Main Street cars also have a left-turn arrow). • The green-light phase. The other two phases are when traffic has the green light going southbound on Main,
Spring is finally here. We can emerge from our houses, go for hikes, take walks, and stroll around in the woods. But we should avoid getting bitten by a deer tick. Deer ticks (Ixodes scapularis) live everywhere in the country, including here in Windham County. Many deer ticks now carry Lyme disease, as well as four other bacterial infections: Rocky Mountain spotted fever, babesiosis, anaplasmosis, and ehrlichiosis. Lyme disease is caused by the spirochete (spiral-shaped bacteria) borrelia burgdorferi, which is...
Deer ticks live in wooded, brushy areas, as well as rock walls and woodpiles - habitats that provide the shelter and humidity that ticks need to survive. Exposure to ticks may be greatest in the woods (especially along trails) and in the fringe area between the woods and border. Bushes act like tick elevators, as deer ticks search for hosts from the tips of grasses and shrubs, not from trees. Generally, ticks attach to a person or animal near ground...
Contractors will close the portion of Williams Street that crosses beneath Interstate 91 until May 1 to make room for repairs to the Interstate bridge overhead. Traffic had been reduced to one lane, with temporary traffic lights that will alternate the flow of traffic, but the new permit allows contractors to close the road completely. Beck & Bellucci, Inc. of Franklin, N.H., the contractors in charge of the bridge repair project, sought and received permission from the Selectboard last week...
I smell maple syrup in the air and travel back to the kitchen of Grandma and Grandpa John. I am 12. Daddy has brought them the first taste of maple syrup from Hazelton's Orchard. Grandma has promised to make sugar cakes with me. Grandma heats the syrup in her cast iron pot. She shows me a long-handled wooden spoon, and she asks if I remember how to tell whether the syrup is hot enough for candy. She lifts the spoon...
“I've been bringing nature inside since I was a kid,” says now-grown-up master gardener Laurie Merrigan. “I don't know that anyone showed me how to do it; I suppose I was just fulfilling the need for some evidence of spring, something green and growing, so I began experimenting with what I could find.” Merrigan used to comb the woods surrounding Guilford, where she grew up, as she looked for pussy willows or other branches that she could bring indoors. “Some...
Last fall's victory by NewBrook at the State Spelling Bee was a cliffhanger. The three-tiered event for fifth- and sixth-graders includes competing against schools in the same supervisory union, with the winners competing regionally and then all the regional winners competing for the third and last round. Students are chosen by elimination, and the top six form the team. The final rounds were held at Northfield Elementary School. VanPamelen explained what a tense time it was. “NewBrook was down by...
David Weaver has accepted another term as the Town Service Officer. Weaver has served in the volunteer position for more than 10 years. He said that he applied for the position after calling the town to inquire into who held the job. The Town Service Officer, a position guaranteed by Vermont statute, assists residents with emergency services like food, fuel, and shelter on evenings and weekends when the social welfare district office is closed. Weaver said that most of his...
It's May, 1961. Black and white civil rights activists known as the Freedom Riders scramble from a burning Greyhound bus and into the closed fists of a white mob on an Alabama roadside. They were among more than 400 black and white Americans, many college-aged, that boarded buses from May to November and rode into the Deep South, defying decades of “Jim Crow” segregation laws. The riders had trained in the principles of nonviolence and knew the dangers ahead. Still,
A new group has formed to address the growing problem of hunger, especially among children, in the region. Organizers describe the Hunger Council of Windham County as a collaboration of front-line service providers, legislators, business leaders, nonprofits, leaders of the faith community, and advocates. The goal is to improve access to food programs and to break down the barriers that hinder access to services. About 20 of the council's members met at the Marlboro College Graduate Center on Monday to...
Obituaries Editor's note: The Commons will publish brief biographical information for citizens of Windham County and others, on request, as community news, free of charge. • Grace W. Bottamini, 92, of Rutland. Died March 7 at her home. Wife of Dr. Joseph T. Bottamini for 56 years. Born in Hardwick, daughter of Jessie May (Corrow) and Henry Fisk Weaver, Brattleboro farmers who went on to become proprietors of the Addison General Store. After graduating from Brattleboro High School, she graduated...
It's 3:30 p.m., and I'm experiencing a collective malfunction. My problem? Picture the old trick of “pat your head and rub your tummy.” Multiply it by 10. Speed it up to an eccentric 1980s pop beat. Jump up and down until entirely out of breath. Now sing. Welcome to a typical day in the life of Footloose. Rehearsal begins at 2:35 p.m., usually with a briefing from our fearless leaders, Ann Landenberger and Abby Hadden, who rattle off the list...
Daffodils can break your heart in so many lovely ways. “I wandered lonely as a cloud/That floats on high o'er vales and hills/When all at once I saw a crowd/A host, of golden daffodils,” wrote William Wordsworth a few years after he and his sister, while walking by a lake, unexpectedly came upon great masses of the flowers. But he was with his sister, so how lonely could he be? Dorothy Wordsworth described that walk with her brother this way...
On Monday morning, the Vermont Yankee nuclear power plant in Vernon was awarded a 20-year operating license extension from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. For the 150 anti-nuclear activists who gathered at Centre Congregational Church that night, the NRC's decision did little to change their firm belief that on March 21, 2012, Vermont Yankee will shut down. Post Oil Solutions, Citizens Awareness Network, Vermont Sierra Club, Vermont Yankee Decommissioning Alliance, and the New England Coalition Against Nuclear Pollution co-sponsored “Countdown to...