General Mental Health Issues
- Medicaid expansion, a decade-in-the-making measure that is expected to provide health insurance to more than 600,000 low-income North Carolinians, will take effect soon. However, the coverage created by expansion is only useful if eligible residents have access to health care providers that accept Medicaid. That’s particularly true for people looking for mental health care, which has been in even higher demand since the COVID-19 pandemic. The N.C. Department of Health and Human Services hopes to make the situation more tenable by raising the minimum reimbursement rates for behavioral health care providers for the first time since 2012. Read more here.
- Two of Colorado’s community mental health centers will merge in July, creating the largest behavioral health center in the state. WellPower, which provides mental health services and homeless outreach in Denver, is combining with Jefferson Center, the safety-net mental health organization for Jefferson, Clear Creek, and Gilpin counties. The centers have mobile medication-assisted treatment for patients addicted to opioids, walk-in crisis centers, and outreach programs that send mental health professionals out with RTD workers, law enforcement, and park rangers. Read more here.
- The demographics of eating disorders are shifting younger, now most commonly affecting teens between 14 and 18 years old, according to a new analysis. The data, based on a FAIR Health repository of 43 billion private health insurance claims, cites an uptick in eating disorders during the COVID-19 pandemic, particularly among teens. From 2018 to 2022, insurance claims for eating disorder treatment increased 65%, with the largest increase occurring during the pandemic's first year. The shift comes amid a youth mental health crisis that experts say has been exacerbated by the pandemic's isolation and social media. Read more here.
- Your inbox is filling up, but you spot an email about a colleague's promotion. Do you scroll past, or give props? Perhaps you're in line for coffee, where it's easy to tune everyone out. However, today, you decide to pick up the tab for the person behind you. How might a small act like this influence your mood? An analysis released Tuesday from scientists behind a research initiative called the BIG JOY Project finds that people who commit daily "micro-acts" of joy experience about a 25% increase in emotional well-being over the course of a week. Read more here.
Youth Mental Health
- More children seek care for mental health disorders today than a decade ago, researchers have shown. The proportion of pediatric visits to the emergency department (ED) for mental health symptoms increased relative to visits related to other health concerns. Now, a report by the National Center for Health Statistics quantifies the characteristics of children who tended to seek care in the ED for mental health concerns using data from more than one million visits between 2018 and 2021. Read more here.
- A bipartisan group of U.S. Senators has written to Meta Platforms (META.O) CEO Mark Zuckerberg demanding documents about its research into the harm to children from its social media platforms. A whistleblower's release of documents in 2021 showed Meta knew Instagram was addictive and worsened body image issues for some teen girls. "Members of Congress have repeatedly asked Meta for information on its awareness of threats to young people on its platforms and the measures that it has taken, only to be stonewalled and provided non-responsive or misleading information," the senators wrote in a letter. Read more here.
- The deep colors and gray shadows illuminate the pain that teens like Reina Kushihashi often feel. Art, Reina said, helps “give form to things like feelings which are really vague sometimes and difficult to process.” The 17-year-old Denver student is one of 35 young artists from across Colorado who have put paint, ink, watercolor, pen, and other materials to canvas to bring the outside world into the mental health challenges that often cast streaks of self-doubt, depression, anxiety, and loneliness over them. Through their art, these artists hope adults will see them and their struggles. Read more here.
Veterans and Military Mental Health
- The Department of Veterans Affairs says it's committed to studying whether psychedelics, like MDMA and psilocybin, are effective treatments for post-traumatic stress disorder ahead of a House hearing expected to touch on the substances. It shows growing recognition that hallucinogenic drugs, when paired with psychotherapy, could potentially have mental health benefits. "VA is committed to studying interventions that promote the health of the nation's veterans," VA assistant undersecretary for health Carolyn Clancy said in written testimony submitted to the committee. Read more here.
- San Diego-based Callery described HomeTeam as a digital training tool that equips veterans with the skills and confidence to support their fellow vets through mental health challenges. HomeTeam consists of four training modules: communicating support, talking about suicide, establishing safety, and connecting to resources. “People know the VA has mental health services,” New York-based Dorison said. “What they don’t know is, ‘How can I be part of the solution for my friend that I care about in a unique peer-support context?’” Read more here.
- The Marine Corps had the highest rate of suicide among all the U.S. military branches in 2022 ― a sobering statistic for a service that has stepped up efforts in recent years to prevent these tragedies. The military has seen a gradual increase in suicide across the branches since 2011, the Defense Department’s annual report on suicide in the military found. In the Marine Corps’ active component, 34.9 out of 100,000 service members died by suicide in 2022, which is up from a rate of 23.9 in 2021 and higher than any other service. Read more here.
- Florida Atlantic University has received a $400,000 grant that will help expand research looking at early life stress, as well as post-traumatic stress disorder, in veterans. The grant was awarded by the Community Foundation of Broward and will be used over the next four years. One project aims to identify early life stress triggers among those who experience extreme adversity like abandonment, abuse, and poverty. The study will also look at how the body’s immune system can positively and negatively affect an individual’s brain function. Read more here.
Gun Violence and Mental Health
- New Hampshire’s largest health system is calling for more action on gun safety after the mass shooting in Lewiston, Maine. In an op-ed published by some New Hampshire news outlets, leaders at Dartmouth Health said preventing gun deaths should be seen as a public health issue, not a political one. New Hampshire has lower rates of gun deaths than the country as a whole, but the vast majority of those deaths are suicides, which killed an average of 125 Granite Staters per year between 2017 and 2021, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Read more here.
- Mental health practitioners and firearms experts are coming together to discuss safety and support for gun owners. The Firearms and Mental Health: Fostering Understanding, Safety, and Support conference is organized by the University of Wyoming’s new Firearms Research Center. More than half of the firearms deaths in the U.S. are done by suicide, and Wyoming has the highest rate of suicide in the country. The conference will talk about suicide prevention methods, such as storing firearms in a safe place like outside of the home, known as ‘out of home safe storage.’ Read more here.
- Despite the psychological toll of being shot by a firearm and surviving, victims may not seek mental health services from licensed professionals due to stigma, fear, and a lack of trusted resources, a new study found. Experts say that research and data in this field often focuses on fatal attacks. There isn’t an official national definition of a nonfatal shooting incident, nor a data repository. According to the Brady Center to Prevent Gun Violence, more than 75,000 people in the United States survive a firearm injury every year. Read more here.
The Opioid Crisis and Addiction Issues
- A majority of those polled in a survey released Friday say the U.S. is losing ground on illegal drugs. The Gallup survey found that 52 percent of Americans said the country has lost ground in the fight against drugs, which Gallup said was a first since it began polling on the subject in 1972. A record-low 24 percent said the nation has made progress in the fight, while 23 percent said things stood still. Read more here.
- The United States wants China's cooperation to stop an illicit flow of "precursor" chemicals that are used to make fentanyl, which is up to 50 times stronger than heroin and is increasingly mixed with other drugs, often with lethal results. In the first nine months of this year, 619 people died of an opioid overdose in San Francisco, most related to the synthetic opioids, compared with 647 such deaths in the whole of 2022, according to the city's Office of the Chief Medical Examiner. Read more here.
- Arkansas Children's Hospital System announced plans to build a first-of-its-kind research center geared toward opioid effects in infants and children. "Babies exposed to opioids before birth are more likely to experience abnormal neurodevelopment, have learning impairments, and face behavioral health challenges. These children are also much more likely to struggle with substance abuse as they grow up," according to a news release from Arkansas Children's Hospital. The hope is for the center's findings to help with treatment nationwide, chief clinical officer Rick Barr said. Read more here.
- Hospitals link people to treatment in their time of greatest need. That includes drug overdoses, which now kill more than 100,000 people in the U.S. every year. However, the standard hospital urine drug tests often do not detect fentanyl, which today is the leading cause of fatal overdoses, or other “synthetic” substances. Expanded urinalyses can be time-consuming and cost-prohibitive. But if hospital drug screens fail to detect these drugs, people will likely not be fully diagnosed. In the second quarter of 2022, only 5 percent of hospitals included fentanyl in their standard drug screen. Read more here.
Climate Change and Mental Health
- Although there isn’t much high-quality research bridging climate change to mental health, researchers have established a connection, the authors of a recent Viewpoint in JAMA Psychiatry noted. Extreme weather events, which range from acute floods and wildfires to chronic droughts and decreased air quality, can be linked to climate change and are associated with psychological fallout including anxiety, depression, and post-traumatic stress disorder. Read more here.
Social Isolation and Loneliness
- The famed media personality and sex therapist, Dr. Ruth Westheimer, will serve as New York’s loneliness ambassador, a first-of-its-kind role intended to assist an underserved mental health need, Gov. Kathy Hochul (D) announced Friday. Westheimer, known for her once-prominent radio and television shows as simply “Dr. Ruth,” pitched Hochul on the job last year. “As New York works to fight the loneliness epidemic, some help from honorary Ambassador Ruth Westheimer may be just what the doctor ordered,” Hochul said in a statement. Read more here.
Research
- A special kind of genetic test that helps determine the best antidepressant for patients with moderate-to-severe depression could generate substantive health system savings and greatly improve patient outcomes, according to new research. The study shows that in B.C. alone, implementing pharmacogenomic testing could save the provincial public health system an estimated $956 million over 20 years. Read more here.
Medicaid Redetermination
- Medicaid was expanded during the pandemic, but the coverage ended in March, with thousands of people losing it monthly. A study shows about 170,000 people will lose Medicaid in the next year. However, with open enrollment happening now, leaders like Dr. Don Williamson with the Alabama Hospital Association say options are available. Read more here.
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