Week of Jan. 9–13, 2023

General Articles

• The increase in the use of telehealth services during the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic expanded the number of people receiving care for several common mental health disorders, Rand Corporation researchers said in a new study published in JAMA Health Forum. Mental health services provided for some conditions were 10% to 20% higher by December 2020 than at the start of the year, according to the research, which tracked claims for more than 5 million adults with private health insurance. Read more here

Youth Mental Health

• Experts are increasingly warning of a connection between heavy social media use and mental health issues in children — a hot topic now driving major lawsuits against tech giants. Why it matters: Seattle Public Schools' recently filed lawsuitagainst TikTok, Meta, Snap and others — which accuses the social media giants of contributing to a youth mental health crisis — is one of hundreds of similar cases. Driving the news: Some scientists who study technology's effects on children say the negatives far outweigh any positives. Read more here.
• Seattle Public Schools is suing social media companies including TikTok and Meta, saying the tech giants’ “misconduct has been a substantial factor in causing a youth mental health crisis.” Driving the news: “This mental health crisis is no accident. It is the result of the Defendants’ deliberate choices and affirmative actions to design and market their social media platforms to attract youth,” the lawsuit states. The lawsuit alleges that the defendants have violated Washington state's public nuisance law. Read more here.
• In the wake of the Uvalde school shooting, Texas school districts are once again rethinking how they respond to threats of violence. Round Rock Independent School District’s behavioral health and school police departments train and work together to provide a preventive approach. One of the ways they’re working to ensure safety is by referring students who have posed a threat to themselves or others to the district’s in-house social workers. Read more here.
• A federal agency will provide more than $2.3 million to two Kentucky organizations to support school safety and mental health, U.S. Sen. Mitch McConnell said. The Department of Health and Human Services is awarding more than $2 million to the Kentucky Educational Development Finance Corporation in Ashland and $250,000 to Seven Counties Services Inc., based in Louisville, the senator announced Thursday. Both grants will fund mental health support and early intervention programs in Kentucky schools. Read more here.
• Lawmakers in New York state are considering joining a dozen other states that allow students to take mental healthdays off from school. The proposal is expected to be introduced this month in Albany. The intention is to make emotional wellness a health priority. The stresses of growing up, amplified by the isolation of the pandemic, have created a generation of depressed and anxiety-ridden youth, with suicide on the rise among people aged 15 to 24 in the U.S., according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Read more here.

Climate Change and Mental Health

• “Climate change is projected to cause 83 million excess deaths by 2100.” Statistics such as this depict a grim future for humanity and the planet alike, and are more frequently being shared across news networks, social media platforms and stream-able documentaries. The reality of these projections can negatively affect individuals’ mental health, and threatens to devalue the importance of individual actions in the fight against the changing climate. This perception of individual actions as unimportant, however, is both inaccurate and extremely dangerous. Read more here.

The Opioid Crisis and Addiction Issues

• The worsening opioid epidemic is prompting more people to carry a nasal spray that reverses overdoses and become de facto first responders in life-or-death situations. Why it matters: Naloxone acts five times quicker than the approximately 10-minute average arrival time for EMS technicians, according to a federal overdose trackerlaunched last month. That can be critical when fentanyl, the synthetic drug behind most opioid overdose deaths, renders an individual unconscious and not breathing in as little as 90 seconds. Read more here.
• Access to treatment for addiction has long plagued U.S. health systems. Why? Two reasons: It is expensive, and the long-term value of addiction treatment is often disregarded by insurance companies and other payers. Its dirty little secret is that access to treatments that work are available to the few who can pay for it — as I once needed to do — while millions of Americans get substandard treatment or none at all. Read more here.
• Controlled substances became a little less controlled during the pandemic. That benefited both patients (for their health) and telehealth startups (to make money). Some potentially addictive medications — like buprenorphine and Adderall — are now far more available online to patients because of regulatory changes. But easier access to the drugs has both upsides and downsides, since they’re often dispensed without accompanying therapy that improves the odds of a patient’s success. Read more here.
• Cirrhosis or severe liver disease used to be something that mostly struck people in middle age, or older. Increasingly, alcohol-related liver disease is killing younger people in the U.S. Johnson is part of a disturbing trend of 25-to-34-year-old men and women experiencing severe, and sometimes fatal, liver damage related to their drinking. A2018 study reported that between 2009 and 2016, deaths attributed to alcohol-related cirrhosis — scarring of the organ that can lead to its failure over time — had been consistently rising, with the sharpest increase among those in that age group. Read more here.

 Health Insurance and Health Care Spending

• Widespread medical debt is a uniquely American problem. Roughly 40% of U.S. adults have at least $250 in medical debt, according to a survey conducted by Kaiser Family Foundation. "The history of medical debt is basically a history of the changing answer to the following question: When the patient can't pay the bill, who foots it?" said Dr. Luke Messac, an emergency physician at Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston who is writing a book about the history of medical debt. Read more here.

 Research

• A new Alzheimer’s drug is hitting the market — the first with clear-cut evidence that it can slow, by several months, the mind-robbing disease. It’s a long-needed new treatment, but experts also are voicing a lot of caution: The drug isn’t a cure, it’s only intended for early-stage patients, requires IV doses every two weeks, and comes with some safety concerns. It’s not even clear just how noticeable that modest benefitwill be in people’s everyday lives. Read more here…

Federal and State Policy

• Nearly 16 million Americans have so far signed up for health insurance through the Affordable Care Act's marketplace, a 13% jump from a year earlier, according to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) on Wednesday. Enrollment for 2023 healthcare plans under the Affordable Care Act, also known as Obamacare, is open between Nov. 1 and Jan. 15. About 3.1 million people who have signed up for the plans are new enrollees, HHS said. Read more here.
• The U.S. government will announce a list of 10 prescription drugs for which it plans to negotiate the prices for Medicare recipients on Sept. 1, and the prices a year later, a top Biden administration official said on Wednesday. President Joe Biden in August signed into law the Inflation Reduction Act, which among its provisions for the first time allows the federal Medicare health plan for people age 65 and older and the disabled to negotiate prices on some of the most expensive drugs. Read more here.
• After a midterm electionand record flow of anti-transgender legislation last year, Republican state lawmakers this year are zeroing in on questions of bodily autonomy with new proposals to limit gender-affirming health care and abortion access. More than two dozen bills seeking to restrict transgender health care access have been introduced across 11 states for the legislative sessions beginning in early 2023. Bills targeting other facets of trans livelihood have been filed in many of the same states and are expected in several others with GOP majorities. Read more here.
• California state Sen. Susan Talamantes Eggman, a Stockton Democrat who was instrumental in passing Gov. Gavin Newsom’s signature mental health care legislation last year, has been appointed to lead the Senate’s influential health committee, a change that promises a more urgent focus on expanding mental health services and moving homeless people into housing and treatment. Eggman, a licensed social worker, co-authored the novel law that allows families, clinicians, first responders, and others to petition a judge to mandate government-funded treatment and services for people whose lives have been derailed by untreated psychotic disorders and substance use. Read more here.
• A class-action lawsuit filed against the state by children's rights advocates claims Iowa is denying Medicaid-eligible children their legal right to mental health care. Disability Rights Iowa, along with national health and law advocacy organizations, filed the suit in district court Friday, accusing state officials of a “longstanding failure” to provide children with legally required and medically necessary mental and behavioral health services. Plaintiffs say despite receiving federal funding to administer care to young Iowans, the state “administers an inadequate, inaccessible and dysfunctional mental health system.” Read more here.