Where can I find information on mental health?

“I’m doing research for school and I need to find information on mental health.”

The Newton Falls Public Library has a section devoted to mental health, including books on the history of mental illness, memoirs, and books to help people and their families understand, treat, and live with their mental illness. DSM-5 Made Easy: The Clinician’s Guide to Diagnosis, written by James Morrison, and Mental Health Disorders Sourcebook, edited by Amy L. Sutton, provide basic information on a variety of different disorders.

We also looked online. The National Alliance on Mental Illness, founded in 1979, has a lot of information on their website, NAMI.org. They provide information on symptoms, treatment, and support on everything from anxiety to schizophrenia. Database resources are available as well. The Ohio Web Library provides access to Consumer Health Complete, a database of health information including videos, diagrams, magazine articles, fact sheets, and scholarly reports.

Our patron was specifically looking for information on illnesses similar to schizophrenia. We found schizoaffective disorder, who involves a person having some of the symptoms of schizophrenia (including delusions, disorganized thoughts or speech, hallucinations, and reduced emotions or behavior, such as a flat voice and expression or a lack of pleasure in life) for at least a month, along with symptoms of depression of bipolar disorder. Morrison also mentions schizophreniform disorder, which might be diagnosed when a person has only been showing symptoms of schizophrenia for less than six months. 

When should I prune my roses?

No one here at the Newton Falls Public Library grows roses, but we do have access to a lot of gardening books. We checked Lewis Hill’s Pruning Made Easy, Rayford Clayton Reddell’s The Rose Bible, and www.heirloomroses.com to find answers for our patron. As it turned out, the subject was more contentious than we expected.

Some gardeners like to prune in the fall so that the rosebushes don’t need to carry the extra wood through the winter. Cutting off spindly canes will prevent them from whipping against their neighbors, and shortening long canes will reduce the likelihood of them being loosened by the winter weather.

However, other gardeners believe that fall pruning makes it more difficult for the rose to survive the winter, because they’re losing food stored in their branches. Also, pruning also tends to jumpstart new growth, which is then killed by the cold. They prefer to prune in spring, clearing away dead and damaged wood from the winter and previous season.

Julie Washington, a writer for the Plain Dealer, interviewed a few of Northeastern Ohio’s rose experts in October 2013, and they were very firm: don’t prune until the spring in Ohio. They also recommend that gardeners clear dead leaves from around their roses, and perhaps treat them with a commercially available dormant oil or spray.