Alicia Ault

You walk into the room, but you can’t remember why. You’ve forgotten where you left your keys. Lapses like that seem to be happening more often. The beginnings of Alzheimer’s disease? Maybe, maybe not.

Q Why are my mental health benefits less generous than those that my insurance policy provides for other conditions?

A When mental health coverage was first added to benefits packages a few decades ago, there was still a persistent belief that a condition like depression was not as real as heart disease or cancer. There also were few medications or other therapies that offered significant improvement. Many employers did not offer rich coverage because they assumed the government would eventually pay for treatment of serious mental illnesses such as schizophrenia or bipolar disease.

Barbra Lancelot has a master’s in education and a long career working with special-needs children. Until recently, she also had a good health insurance plan and prescription drug coverage, provided by her employer. But late last year, the 58-year-old College Park resident lost her job. Coverage was extended to her under COBRA, the law that guarantees temporary continuance of employer-provided insurance but requires the worker to pay the full premium.

As a boy, Cristian Samper rambled through the tropical forests of his native Colombia, marveling at the diversity that surrounded him. Not content to view the flora and fauna only in the abstract, he began what was to become a lifelong obsession and vocation, cataloging the diversity and assembling it into collections that forcefully argue for its preservation.

Over its 140 years, the National Museum of Health and Medicine has been a destination for amateur Civil War historians, medical researchers and tourists with a penchant for the macabre. The museum, on the campus of the Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington, still has plenty to satisfy the prurient, but over the last five years it has put away more of its gruesome artifacts and edged further into the museum mainstream. “We have moved with the times, so we have a more contextual approach,”said Dr. Jim Connor, assistant director for collections.