Week of Jan. 30-Feb. 3, 2023

Week of Jan. 30-Feb. 3, 2023

Key topics covered during this period focus on general mental health issues, youth mental health, the opioid crisis and addiction issues, gun violence, climate change and social determinants, health care spending, and federal and state policy issues.

General Articles

• Mental health professionals are seeing an increase in requests from companies for trauma support training. Why it matters: From self-care practices to recognizing the physiological impacts of trauma, more organizations have realized that workers can’t just be expected to handle the trauma on their own, according to Ruth Yeo-Peterman, a resilience programming trainer with the Center for Victims of Torture. By the numbers: An overwhelming majority of employers (91%) surveyed through wellness management platform Wellable say they expect to invest more in mental health programs for employees this year. Read more here.
• Americans are staying healthier longer than ever before—and they’re transforming what older age looks like. The big picture: “We have essentially created a new stage of life. Americans retire, on average, by their early to mid-60s, yet many now remain vibrant into their mid-80s,” David Brooks writes in The Atlantic. By the numbers: A recent study from AARP and National Geographic found that happiness dwindles in middle age but then spikes again in one’s 70s and 80s, as people find themselves with more free time and less stress. Read more here. 

Youth Mental Health

• Kids’ mental health is now parents’ biggest concern, according to a new study from the Pew Research Center. The big picture: Gone are the days of parents sitting up worrying about their kids getting into fights, or trouble with drugs and alcohol. Social media and the pandemic have ushered in a new dimension to parents’ already challenging jobs. By the numbers: 40% of parents said they are extremely or very worried that their kids will struggle with anxiety or depression. Read more here.
• Surgeon General Vivek Murthy said on “CNN Newsroom” on Saturday he believes 13-year-olds are too young to join social media and that being on those platforms does a “disservice” to children. The big picture: Scientists have warned of a connection between heavy social media use and mental health issues in children, saying that the negatives outweigh the positives. Instagram, Snapchat, and Twitter all allow users ages 13 or older on their platforms. Why it matters: American teenagers are in the middle of a mental health crisis. Read more here. 
• According to a new study, disrupted sleep in parents and disrupted sleep in their children are each correlated with increased stress in the parents. In fact, it didn’t matter whether the parent had a sleep disorder or the child did. Both equally affected the parent’s stress levels. The real kicker? Stressed-out parents don’t sleep well. Nor do stressed-out kids. So the more sleep-deprived everyone in the family gets, the more stressed they all get—and the more stressed out they get, the worse they sleep. Read more here. 
• Public school districts that received a windfall of COVID relief funds for mental health services are confronting a new dilemma: How to sustain counseling, screenings, teletherapy, and other programs when the money runs out. Why it matters: The youth mental health crisis is not getting better, and schools are increasingly being pressed into service as first responders. The big picture: Advocates, researchers, and administrators told Axios the schools will be hard-pressed to retain qualified mental health personnel after the funding expires at the end of fiscal year 2024. Read more here. 

The Opioid Crisis and Addiction Issues

• Roughly 110,000 Americans died from a drug overdose between February 2021 and February 2022. Overall life expectancy in the U.S. fell in 2020 and again in 2021, after decades of progress—and deaths linked to alcohol, drugs, and suicide are a major part of that change. (So are deaths from COVID, of course.) Overdoses, suicides and other “deaths of despair”—a label proposed by economists Anne Case and Angus Deaton—have been climbing since the 1990s and may have accelerated in recent years. Read more here. 
• A Kentucky commission assigned to distribute money from a massive settlement with opioid companies has made its first funding award to help combat the state’s opioid epidemic, Attorney General Daniel Cameron said. The Kentucky Opioid Abatement Advisory Commission has awarded $10.5 million in funding to a pilot program. The program will offer behavioral health treatment options for people struggling with substance use disorder as an alternative to incarceration. Read more here. 
• Every morning when Drug Enforcement Administration Administrator Anne Milgram goes into the office in Arlington, Virginia, she walks by walls covered in photos of people of all genders, ages, and races. The Drug Enforcement Administration created an exhibit called “The Faces of Fentanyl” inside its headquarters to commemorate the lives lost from fentanyl poisoning. Anyone can submit photos of a loved one lost to fentanyl to be displayed. She passes by portraits of more than 4,800 faces—all of people who died as a result of the synthetic opioid fentanyl. Read more here. 
• Members of Congress are urging Secretary of State Antony Blinken to pressure China to do more to curb the flow of fentanyl and synthetic opioids into the United States on his visit to the country, which is expected to take place in the next few days. On Wednesday, a group of 14 Republican senators led by Marco Rubio of Florida wrote to Blinken ahead of his trip highlighting China’s role in the “fentanyl crisis” as one of many issues they wanted him to address. Read more here. 
• The end to the fentanyl crisis may be in sight, thanks to a team of researchers in Texas who claim they have successfully developed a vaccine that could be a “game changer” in addiction treatment. A team led by the University of Houston has developed what they say is a fentanyl vaccine that can block the synthetic opioid from entering the brain—essentially curing addiction by eliminating the euphoric high. Read more here. 
• Sitting among the warehouses of Dulles, Virginia, is one of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration’s forensic labs. It’s one of eight across the country where scientists analyze illegal drugs and try to stay ahead of what’s driving deadly overdoses. Starting in the late 1990s with overprescribing of prescription narcotics, the opioid epidemic has continued to plague the United States for decades. What has changed is the type of drugs that have killed more than half a million people during the past 20 years. Read more here. 

Gun Violence and Mental Health

The gun control debate always heats up after a mass shooting, as it has in the wake of the twin shootings in California last month. The summer’s mass shootings in Buffalo, New York, and Uvalde, Texas, finally spurred lawmakers to action with the passage of the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act bill, the first meaningful piece of gun legislation in two decades. But the U.S. gun problem is still the world’s worst, and new data shows we have a less well-known, but equally urgent reason to keep talking about gun control: suicides. Read more here. 

Climate Change

• Air pollution is increasingly recognized as an important environmental risk factor for mental health. However, epidemiologic evidence on long-term exposure to low levels of air pollutants with incident depression and anxiety is still very limited. Objectives: To investigate the association of long-term joint exposure to multiple air pollutants with incident depression and anxiety. Design, Setting, and Participants: This prospective, population-based cohort study used data from the UK Biobank. Read more here. 

Social Determinants
A new survey found that Americans living paycheck to paycheck increased over the last year, with nearly two-thirds of Americans reporting that they do so. About 64% of consumers said they were living paycheck to paycheck at the end of 2022, according to a report from Pymnts and LendingClub. The report found that the number is about 9.3 million more than the previous year and includes about 8 million people making more than $100,000 per year. Read more here. 

States that expanded access to federal food benefits saw decreases in the rates of cases investigated by child protective services, a new study by researchers from UNC Chapel Hill shows. “It was affirming to see it aligning with mounting evidence,” said Anna Austin, an assistant professor at the Gillings School of Global Public Health and principal investigator on the study. Austin said growing evidence shows that programs and policies such as increasing minimum wage and expanding food benefits eligibility provide “critical support to parents” that helps them create a safe environment for their children. Read more here. 

Health Care Spending

• The United States spends more on health care than any other high-income country but still has the lowest life expectancy at birth and the highest rate of people with multiple chronic diseases, according to a new report from The Commonwealth Fund, an independent research group. The report, released Tuesday, also says that compared with peer nations, the United States has the highest rates of deaths from avoidable or treatable causes and the highest maternal and infant death rates. Read more here. 

Federal and State Policy

• A provision in the Inflation Reduction Act that allows Medicare to negotiate prices on the costliest prescription drugs each year will likely save the United States billions of dollars—as long as the drug industry doesn’t interfere, according to a study published in JAMA Health Forum. Researchers from Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School estimated how much money the new policy would have saved the United States had it been in effect from 2018 to 2020—the most recent years for which data is available on Medicare spending. Read more here.
• The Biden administration estimated that it could collect as much as $4.7 billion from insurance companies with newer and tougher penalties for submitting improper charges on the taxpayers’ tab for Medicare Advantage care. The Department of Health and Human Services said it will begin collecting payments from insurers when an audit turns up that they charged for diagnoses that are not reflected in the patient’s medical records. The government has not sought refunds for those payments in over a decade, the agency said. Read more here.
• Sen. Bernie Sanders was named as the new chair of the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions last week. It’s a position that Sanders requested, because it deals with many of the health care issues he’s worked on during his long political career. Vermont Public senior political correspondent Bob Kinzel had a chance to speak with Sanders about his priorities for the new session. He joined Morning Edition host Mitch Wertlieb to share what he learned. Read more here.
• Changes are on the way for Medicaid enrollees in Idaho as pandemic-era standards are set to come to an end in the spring. Beginning Wednesday, the Department of Health and Welfare will begin sending notices to the roughly 150,000 people enrolled in Medicaid who no longer qualify. During the pandemic, the federal government halted state departments from ending anyone’s Medicaid coverage and allowed continuous enrollment. Read more here.
• The director of Missouri’s Medicaid program said he expects “about 200,000” Medicaid enrollees to lose coverage over the course of a year as a result of the state resuming annual eligibility renewals after a three-year pause. The state’s Department of Social Services has not previously provided a public estimate of those projected to lose coverage. DSS said Wednesday it expects Medicaid enrollment numbers to “level off” approaching this July, and then “slowly ramp down” by around 200,000 people over the course of the next fiscal year. Read more here.
• Nearly 300,000 Tennesseans who enrolled in Medicaid during the COVID-19 pandemic are expected to lose their coverage this year now that state officials are once again allowed to bump people from the government-funded health insurance program. Across the United States, state officials are preparing to comb through their Medicaid rolls after Congress agreed late last year to sunset a COVID-19 public health emergency requirement that prohibited states from booting people off Medicaid. As a result, millions are expected to be removed from the program. Read more here.