Week of April 22–26, 2024

General Mental Health Articles

• Four years ago, California’s leaders passed a new law to make insurance companies pay for mental health and addiction treatment that’s medically necessary. Despite that, today, insurance companies still sometimes refuse to pay for needed treatments. CalMatters wants your help learning about this problem. Read more here.
• Many parents today find parenting a challenge to their ability to connect with other adults, according to a new national survey published by The Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center in Columbus. In fact, 66% of 1,005 surveyed parents felt the demands of parenthood sometimes or frequently left them feeling isolated and lonely, while nearly 40% felt as if they have no one to support them in their parenting role. Read more here.
• The use of antipsychotic medications for people with dementia has gone up in recent years, even amid warnings. A new study suggests that these drugs — developed for conditions like bipolar disorder and schizophrenia, but sometimes prescribed for dementia — pose more risks to people with dementia than previously known. Read more here.

Youth Mental Health

• Schools play a critical role in responding to the youth mental health crisis by serving as both a frontline support system and a hub for prevention and intervention. Of students receiving mental health services, most obtain those services in schools, making schools the most accessed mental health delivery system by children and adolescents. With the increasing prevalence of mental health challenges among young people, schools are uniquely positioned to identify and address these issues early. Read more here.

Mental Health Parity

• The Mental Health Parity and Addictions Equity Act (MHPAEA) of 2008 aimed to eliminate discriminatory health plan coverage that prevents individuals from receiving effective mental health and substance use disorder treatment. MHPAEA requires that health plans not design or apply financial requirements and treatment limitations that impose a greater burden on access to in-network mental health and substance use disorder benefits than plans and issuers impose on access to comparable medical/surgical benefits. Read more here.

Suicide Prevention

• The White House unveiled an updated national strategy on suicide prevention that includes more emphasis on health equity and diversity and the mental-health impact of social media, revising its decade-old plan amid a national rise in suicide rates. Second gentleman Doug Emhoff launched the new strategy at the White House, which he prefaced with words of comfort and encouragement. The U.S. remains in a small clique of about 40 mostly high-income nations that have national plans to combat a menace that has left no society unscarred. Read more here.
• Actor Ashley Judd and singer-songwriter Aloe Blacc, who both lost loved ones to suicide, helped the Biden administration promote its new national strategy to prevent suicide. Judd’s mother, country star Naomi Judd, died nearly two years ago. Blacc’s frequent collaborator, Tim Bergling, died in 2018. Both were on hand as Doug Emhoff, the husband of Vice President Kamala Harris, helped unveil the Democratic administration’s blueprint for reducing suicides in the United States. Read more here.
• A local healthcare system is offering suicide prevention courses throughout the Chicago area. Franciscan Health, which has hospitals in Northwest Indiana and Chicago's south suburbs, is offering free Question, Persuade, Refer Suicide Prevention Courses in April and May. The courses are based on a curriculum developed by the QPR Institute. According to the QPR Institute, people trained will learn how to recognize the warning signs of a suicide crisis and how to question, persuade, and refer someone to help. Read more here.

988 Lifeline

• The 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline—known as 988—holds promise for significantly improving the mental health of Americans and has the potential to accelerate the decriminalization of mental illness. Efforts to understand how jurisdictions are planning for the interface between 988 and 911, aligning program procedures, and creating staff buy-in are essential, as they could highlight effective solutions for jurisdictions that do not yet have a plan and reveal common challenges. Read more here.

The Opioid Crisis and Addiction Issues

• It’s easier than ever for doctors to prescribe a key medicine for opioid addiction since the U.S. government lifted an obstacle last year. However, despite the looser restrictions and the ongoing overdose crisis, a new study finds little change in the number of people taking the medication. Researchers analyzed prescriptions filled by U.S. pharmacies for the treatment drug buprenorphine. The number of prescribers rose last year after doctors no longer needed to get a special waiver to prescribe the drug, while the number of patients filling prescriptions barely budged. Read more here.
• People recovering from addiction can sometimes have to wait for weeks or months to get into a residential treatment facility to get the help they need. Those shortages are especially felt in tribal communities in rural states like Wyoming and Montana – and last summer, inadequate treatment centers in Arizona made headlines for conducting a widespread Medicaid fraud scheme targeting Native Americans. However, a ten-acre ranch recently purchased by the Eastern Shoshone Business Council will help make that transition a little easier for tribal members. Read more here.

Research

• Between 2018 and 2021, the rate of serious psychological distress among adults increased from 3.5% to 4.2%. Although the rate of outpatient mental health care increased from 11.2% to 12.4% overall, the rate decreased from 46.5% to 40.4% among adults with serious psychological distress. When age, sex, and distress were controlled for, a significant increase in outpatient mental health care was observed for young adults but not middle-aged and older adults, and for employed adults but not unemployed adults. Read more here.

Medicaid Coverage

• From Nebraska to North Carolina, states with Republican-led legislatures have slowly moved toward expanding access to Medicaid for thousands of their residents. But some are still holding out. Medicaid provides health care to some 80 million Americans living on low incomes. However, millions more fall into the so-called "coverage gap" where they make too much money for Medicaid but not enough to get their own insurance. Read more here.

Gender-Affirming Care and LGBTQ Issues

• Over 90 percent of transgender teens live in states that have proposed or passed anti-transgender laws, according to a new report. The report from the Williams Institute at the University of California, Los Angeles found that 93 percent of transgender teens from the ages of 13 to 17 live in states where there are laws or proposed laws “banning access to gender-affirming care, participation in sports, use of bathrooms and other sex-separated facilities, or affirmation of gender through pronoun use.” Read more here.
• In my work as a pediatric psychologist, I’ve seen a surge in the number of families with transgender or nonbinary children who are moving to Connecticut, where I live and work. In the past month, a real estate agent colleague has worked with 30 families with transgender children who were trying to find homes in central Connecticut, where they could get access to gender-affirming care. Nearly half of respondents to the U.S. Trans Survey reported having thought about moving to another state because theirs considered, or passed, laws that target transgender people for unequal treatment. Read more here.