Here at b5media’s Health & Wellness Channel, we’re always doing something.
This week, we’re rounding up our “Top 5″ posts.
Some bloggers are focusing on their top five most popular posts, their favorite posts, and even posts that aren’t very well known to their readers.
Because Mental Health Notes is still celebrating its one-year anniversary, I thought I’d go retro with it and list the top five posts I had the most fun writing within the first five months Mental Health Notes was live. (Five just seems to be a common number here, so I’ll stick with it.)
So, without further ado…
May 2007 – …read more

According to The Charleston Gazette article Groups protest ‘lunatic asylum’ name, a pre-Civil War mental hospital in Weston, West Virginia has – after undergoing several name changes spanning the 19th and 20th centuries including “West Virginia Hospital for the Insane,” “Weston State Hospital,” and then simply “Weston Hospital” – gone back to using its maiden name of “Trans-Allegheny Lunatic Asylum.”
Unsurprisingly, many mental health groups in West Virginia are outraged. Folks from the Mountain State Direct Action Center, the West Virginia Mental Health Consumers Association, the West Virginia Mental Health Planning Council, and the West Virginia Americans with Disabilities Act Coalition …read more

“To take away the stigma is to take away the fear.” – Nancy Devine.
Have any of you heard of the old Willard Psychiatric Center in New York? Until it closed in 1995, it went through several names, ultimately sticking with the Willard Psychiatric Center.
Anyway, once Willard was closed in 1995, hundreds of “abandoned” suitcases were found in the attic of one of the center’s buildings. These suitcases belonged to patients at Willard. Of course, the majority – if not all – of the suitcases were taken to and forgotten in the attic because the owners – the patients – died …read more