General Mental Health Articles
- 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 concentration among lower-income people make them issues that the private market has little incentive to solve. Read more here.
- We remain in an ongoing mental health crisis. Persisting for years, it's a crisis marked by increasingly complex health needs and exacerbated by inadequate funding to an already fragmented and fragile system. Our state's Medicaid program is supposed to protect our most vulnerable residents, disproportionately impacted by mental illness. Yet its reimbursements cover on average only 60% of the actual cost to provide the care. Read more here.
- Religious trauma occurs when an individual’s religious upbringing has lasting adverse effects on their physical, mental, or emotional well-being, according to the Religious Trauma Institute. Symptoms can include guilt, shame, loss of trust, and loss of meaning in life. While religious trauma hasn’t officially been classified as a mental disorder in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), there is debate among psychiatrists about whether that should change. Read more here.
Youth Mental Health
- Senators grilled the CEOs of Meta, TikTok, Snap, Discord, and X Wednesday in a heated hearing about harm posed to teens and kids online. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg and TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew faced most of the pressure from the panel, which focused primarily on the ways teens and children can experience harm through Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok. Read more here.
- Senior year for Madeleine Stults wasn’t how it should have been. She was among the 3 million-plus U.S. high school seniors in 2020. There was no prom. No senior trip. No commencement ceremony. Graduation shifted to Zoom. “To not have closure and be cut off from the connections I’d made those four years complicated my mental health,” she said. Read more here.
- The Illinois Department of Human Services is partnering with Google to launch a new centralized portal for children’s mental health care, state officials announced Monday. Gov. JB Pritzker, executives from Google Public Sector, and state legislators gathered at Google’s Fulton Market office in Chicago to announce that the portal, called BEACON, is slated to launch this summer. The governor said a centralized hub will make finding behavioral health resources much easier for parents and providers. Read more here.
- Energy drinks could pose a risk to young brains, according to new research. Those who consumed energy drinks, which are intended to boost energy through the use of caffeine or other stimulants, were shown to have a higher risk of mental health issues, including attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), depression, anxiety, and suicidal thoughts. These findings stem from a review by Fuse, the Centre for Translational Research in Public Health at Teesside University and Newcastle University in the U.K. Read more here.
- For men and boys, caring about sport typically conjures images of passionate competition and fighting for the win. This understanding of care leaves little room for self-care, health and safety, and emotional vulnerability, topics that are fraught with risks for boys and men in a sport culture of hypermasculinity. The National Hockey League Players’ Association recently released its First Line Program to support player mental health. It signals that men’s hockey is finally acknowledging the long-known fact that “a hockey player struggling with mental health would have done so in silence.” Read more here.
Workforce Issues
- There's been a "substantial and persistent" increase in health care workers leaving the industry since the pandemic, as staff who stayed on during the worst of COVID-19 leave for new opportunities in a robust jobs market, according to a new study in JAMA Health Forum. While exit rates have been matched by an uptick in hiring, the constant churn can disrupt the continuity of care and result in poorer patient outcomes, researchers wrote. Read more here.
The Opioid Crisis and Addiction Issues
- Pandemic-era policies that made it easier for patients to receive opioid addiction treatment will continue permanently, the Biden administration announced this week. The changes mark the first time in 20 years the federal government has updated rules governing clinics that provide medication-assisted treatment for opioid use disorder. The finalized policy will allow patients to take home doses of the opioid addiction treatment methadone. Read more here.
- A bill that would decriminalize all strips used to test drugs for deadly substances in West Virginia, the state with the nation’s highest overdose rate, is headed to the desk of Republican Gov. Jim Justice. Justice hasn’t said publicly whether he supports the bill, which has received bipartisan support. The proposal follows a law signed by Justice in 2022 that decriminalized fentanyl testing strips. Read more here.
- When Dr. Art Van Zee finally understood the scale of the disaster looming over his corner of rural Virginia, he naively imagined the drug industry would be just as alarmed. So, the longest serving doctor in the struggling former mining town of St. Charles set out in the early 2000s to tell pharmaceutical executives, federal regulators, Congress, and anyone else who would listen that the arrival of a powerful new opioid painkiller was destroying lives and families and laying the ground for a much bigger catastrophe. Read more here.
- The e-commerce giant eBay will pay $59 million in a settlement with the Justice Department over thousands of pill press machines sold on the platform, the Justice Department said Wednesday. The machines can be used to manufacture counterfeit pills that look just like prescription pills but instead can be laced with substances like fentanyl. Read more here.
- For the first time, an advertising company that worked on Purdue Pharma’s OxyContin account has settled a lawsuit that accused it of falsely marketing opioids as safe. Publicis, a French marketing company, agreed to pay $350 million within the next two months and will not take on any more opioid clients, according to New York Attorney General Letitia James. She and Colorado Attorney General Phil Weiser led the settlement negotiations, which included a consortium of eight other states. Read more here.
988 Hotline
- In July 2022, amid historic rates of mental health illness, the Biden administration launched 988, the new national suicide prevention hotline, to reinvigorate the country's previous, antiquated network. Since its launch, the White House has invested nearly $1 billion into 988, and the hotline has served more than seven million Americans, Danielle Bennett, a spokesperson for the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA), told ABC News. However, some 988 workers, such as Mosby, now say they're burning out and leaving the job. Read more here.
Health Insurance
- The ban on surprise medical bills protected patients from more than 10 million claims for out-of-network services in the first nine months of 2023, according to new estimates by health insurer groups. However, the process for settling billing disputes is still in disarray. AHIP and the Blue Cross Blue Shield Association said more than 670,000 claims were submitted to arbitration between Jan. 1 and Sept. 30, 2023. That eclipses federal estimates that about 17,000 claims would go through the process annually and raises questions about whether the disputes will eventually have trickle-down effects like higher premiums. Read more here.
- Fewer than 1 in 5 adults (17%) say they know how much health care products or services will cost in advance, according to new Gallup polling with Bentley University. No matter how you slice up the data — by age, education level, insurance status, etc. — the results were pretty much the same, "suggesting a society-wide lack of awareness" about personal health care costs, Gallup's Stephanie Marken wrote in a memo. Americans also largely don't think they're getting much value out of their health care dollars. Read more here.
State Bans, Gender-Affirming Care and Related Issues
- Utah Gov. Spencer Cox signed a bill that would ban transgender people's access to public restrooms and locker rooms. "We want public facilities that are safe and accommodating for everyone, and this bill increases privacy protections for all," said Cox, who is running for re-election this year, in a statement. The restrictions for transgender people also apply to sex-segregated locker rooms, showers, and restrooms in public facilities and in K-12 schools unless their gender identity matches their birth certificate, or they had gender-affirming surgery. Read more here.
- Transgender, non-binary, and gender-diverse people had a disproportionately high rate of self-reported mental health conditions, a British study suggested. Among over 1.5 million survey respondents, non-binary patients who were transgender reported a long-term mental health condition most often out of 15 gender groups, with a rate of 47.21% after age adjustment (95% CI 42.86-51.60), Ruth Elizabeth Watkinson, PhD, of the University of Manchester in England, and colleagues found. Read more here.
Federal and State Policy
- “The number of state psychiatric hospital beds for adults with severe mental illness has continued to decline to a historic low of 36,150, or 10.8 per 100,000 population in 2023," says the Treatment Advocacy Center, a Virginia based nonprofit. Colorado's numbers are even lower than the national average with 83 beds per 100,000 people. There were 543 beds in 2016, and last year there were 482. Read more here.
Manage Cookie Preferences