General Mental Health Articles
- We’re months away from another presidential election and Millennials and Gen Z’ers are poised to make an impact. The two groups comprise nearly half of potential voters for the 2024 ballot, and by 2028 they’ll overtake Boomers as the largest group of potential voters by age. For them, sound mental health is a priority, and they expect their elected officials to prioritize mental health too. Read more here.
- Some of America's most challenging behavioral health care problems include a key disadvantage: They're not very profitable to treat. Serious mental illness and addiction have a profound effect on families and communities, but their complexity and their concentration among lower-income people make them issues that the private market has little incentive to solve. Read more here.
- Living alone is linked to higher rates of self-reported depression than living with others, according to data released from a 2021 National Health Interview Survey. It's clear — even to Elmo — that many Americans are having a hard time and that the loneliness epidemic has become a major threat to their well-being. Adults who say they live alone and rarely or never receive emotional or social support were almost twice as likely to say they have feelings of depression, compared to those who never or rarely receive support but live with others. Read more here.
- Study after study has shown that people with depression have trouble recalling specific memories. They might hear the word "party," for instance, and think, "I don’t get invited to parties often." By contrast, someone without depression could hear the word "party" and immediately recall a childhood birthday or recent celebration at a friend’s house. Kymberly Young, an associate professor of psychiatry at the University of Pittsburgh, may have found a key: A study published in JAMA Network Open from her and her team suggests that familiar scents could help unlock those memories. Read more here.
- Kindness, it appears, comes in many forms – in this case, we’re talking red, hairy, and adorable. Last month, the Sesame Street character Elmo took to social media to pose a question to the masses. “Elmo is just checking in! How is everybody doing?” The post has garnered more than 210 million views on the social media platform, X, with almost 60,000 reposts and 161,000 likes. Even more surprising was the variety in the 20,000 responses Elmo has received. Read more here.
Youth Mental Health
- As schools across the country respond to a youth mental health crisis accelerated by the pandemic, many are confronting the thorny legal, ethical, and practical challenges of getting parents on board with treatment. The issue has become politicized, with some states looking to streamline access as conservative politicians elsewhere propose further restrictions, accusing schools of trying to indoctrinate students and cut out parents. Read more here.
- Roughly every month, I receive an email from a parent somewhere in the world asking for help with a child who is violent, angry, or aggressive. Some people describe being physically beaten or having their life threatened by their son or daughter. These families may spend thousands of dollars on special schools and treatments. Often, they are desperate, afraid, and looking for guidance. Psychologists recognize several conditions that are characterized by violence and aggression. They include conduct disorder and disruptive mood dysregulation disorder in children as well as antisocial personality disorder in adults. Read more here.
Abortion and Mental Health
- As advocates push this year for ballot measure initiatives aiming to protect abortion rights, key differences have emerged in the language of proposed measures. Among them is the inclusion of mental health exceptions. A Missouri proposal would allow lawmakers to restrict abortions after a fetus is considered viable, except if an abortion “is needed to protect the life or physical or mental health of the pregnant person.” A similar measure has been proposed in Arizona. Michigan voters passed an abortion rights amendment with a mental health exception for viability limits. Read more here.
Gun Violence and Mental Health
- Infants could be born at a disadvantage just by virtue of living close to gun violence. That’s the upshot of new research from Princeton University economist Janet Currie and her colleagues. Stress, Currie said, could be the key mechanism connecting gun violence with poor health outcomes. Angela West-Robinson knows this fact well. As a doula, she sees it every day. During the COVID-19 pandemic, she started a peer support group called Melanin Motherhood to give Black and Brown women a forum to discuss issues like stress and mental health. Read more here.
The Opioid Crisis and Addiction Issues
- Long-term opioid therapy (LTOT), often prescribed for chronic pain when other options have proven ineffective, is associated with negative perceptions due to the history of widespread opioid overprescription and the current overdose crisis. This stigma poses a barrier to care continuity for these patients, which is particularly concerning, as abruptly discontinuing such medication can lead to adverse health effects due to physical dependency. Read more here.
Gender-Affirming Care and Related Issues
- When the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade with its ruling in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, the adverse disruptions to both the legal landscape of abortion and the quality of life of both abortion-seekers and pregnant patients were nearly immediate. It has also endangered other constitutional privacy matters that determine the right to purchase and use contraception, the right of same-sex intimacy and marriage, and the right to marry across racial lines. However, the far right intends to test the judicial system for future breaches by first targeting transgender people’s access to gender-affirming care. Read more here.
- More than half of Black transgender and nonbinary young people reported having seriously considered suicide in the past year, and more than twenty percent said they had attempted suicide, according to data released Tuesday by The Trevor Project, an LGBTQ youth suicide prevention organization. Read more here.
- Angela Weeks, director of the University of Connecticut School of Social Work’s National SOGIE Center at Innovations Institute, is urging behavioral health providers to ask people how they identify. The acronym SOGIE stands for sexual orientation, gender identity, and expression. There’s no consistent, structured way to collect identity data from people accessing mental health and substance use services, making it challenging to pinpoint how best to address inequity. Read more here.
Medicaid Redetermination
- As the unwinding of Medicaid’s continuous coverage requirement reaches its halfway point, it’s clearer than ever that administrative burdens are leading eligible people to lose coverage. At least 15 million people have lost Medicaid, and nationwide about 71 percent were disenrolled for procedural reasons. That means they lost coverage because they didn’t complete a step in the renewal process, not because they were actually determined to be ineligible. Read more here.
- More than two million people have been removed from Texas' Medicaid program since federal pandemic-era coverage protections were lifted last April, new state data shows. That's the most of any state and nearly equivalent to all of Houston —Texas' most populous city— losing coverage in less than a year. More than 16.4 million people have lost Medicaid coverage nationwide since eligibility checks, which were put on hold during the pandemic, resumed last spring, according to health policy research nonprofit KFF. Read more here.
Federal and State Policy
- About a year ago, Republican Gov. Glenn Youngkin rolled out an ambitious initiative that aims to transform the way psychiatric care is delivered by creating a system that allows people to get the treatment they need without delay, in their own community, and not necessarily in the confines of a hospital, easing the burden on both patients and law enforcement. While Virginia’s struggles may be particularly acute, Youngkin is not alone in his focus on the issue. Read more here.
- For decades, thousands of Californians struggling with mental health and addiction have languished on the street. Now, voters will decide whether a March 5th ballot measure is the solution to get them the care they desperately need. Proposition 1, the only statewide measure on the ballot, would raise almost $6.4 billion in bonds for more than 11,000 new treatment beds and homeless housing units. Read more here.
- With the bill citing an “urgent need” to increase the number of doctors and other workers to care for people with mental health and substance-abuse issues, the Florida Senate on Tuesday began moving forward with a $114 million plan that includes designating behavioral health teaching hospitals. Read more here.
Manage Cookie Preferences