Week of May 8–12, 2023

Week of May 8–12, 2023

General Articles

• At its best, work lets us support ourselves, bring meaning to our lives, offer opportunities for growth and form friendships and a sense of community. At its worst, work can be overwhelming, create burn-out and trigger mental health issues. Those issues affect us as individuals as well as our friends, families and community. According to the U.S. surgeon general, 84% of workers said their workplace conditions had contributed to at least one mental-health challenge. This creates both a responsibility and a unique opportunity for corporate and nonprofit employers and leadership. Read more here.
• Patients who take antidepressants are at highest risk of harming themselves in the weeks immediately after the drug is prescribed, according to a new analysis of more than 8.4 million electronic health records. Why it matters: The Food and Drug Administration has warned since 2004 that antidepressants can increase suicidal behavior, but little is known about when the potential threat is greatest, researchers wrote. Antidepressants are also estimated to take up to eight weeks to begin working, with side effects common before mood lifts. Read more here.
• Social media is a topic that is up for debate all around the world. People should get to know better the effects it has on people’s lives. While social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and TikTok have undoubtedly transformed the way people communicate and interact with one another, it is also believed that the negative effects of social media far outweigh the positives. Social media is negatively affecting people all around the globe. Read more here.

Youth Mental Health

• U.S. adolescents made fewer weekly emergency department (ED) visits for mental health conditions in Fall 2022 compared to a year earlier, researchers at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) reported on Thursday. By late 2022, pandemic restrictions had been loosened or lifted and adolescents had generally returned to schools, with better social engagement and reduced isolation linked with improved mental and behavioral health, the researchers noted. Read more here.
• For the first time, the American Psychological Association has issued recommendations for guiding teenagers’ use of social media. The advisory, released Tuesday, is aimed at teens, parents, teachers and policy makers. This comes at a time when teenagers are facing high rates of depression, anxiety and loneliness. And, as NPR has reported, there's mounting evidence that social media can exacerbate and even cause these problems. Read more here.  
• Concerns continue to grow about the impact social media use has on the mental health and well-being of children and adolescents. According to a new national survey conducted online by The Harris Poll on behalf of The On Our Sleeves Movement For Children’s Mental Health, half (50%) of parents of children younger than 18 feel their child(ren)’s mental health has suffered during the past 12 months because of social media use. Read more here.
• Abe Gebeyehu, a school-based mental health practitioner, started noticing things were not going well for his students in 2020. When Minnesota schools closed their doors to in-person learning, the time they spent on computers and other screens skyrocketed. Their interactions with friends and teachers plummeted. They began, in the online meetings he had with them, describing symptoms of anxiety and depression. Gebeyehu is a school-based mental-health practitioner. In 2021 he began working with the Wilder Foundation’s Kofi Project, a culturally-specific, school-based mental health program for African American youth. Read more here.  

Covid-19 and Mental Health

• Cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) lessens fatigue and improves concentration among long-COVID patients, finds a Dutch randomized controlled trial published yesterday in Clinical Infectious Diseases. The Amsterdam University Medical Centers–led study involved 114 long-COVID patients with severe fatigue and functional impairment 3 to 12 months after infection. Participants were randomly assigned in a 1:1 ratio to receive either CBT or usual care (mainly physical therapy and/or occupational therapy) from November 12, 2020, to September 21, 2021. Read more here.
• A new study from clinicians at the University of California-Los Angeles (UCLA) offers more insight into the mental and physical components of long COVID, suggesting that people who perceived having more cognitive difficulties during their acute COVID-19 illnesses—including "brain fog," anxiety, and depression—were more likely to later report the lingering physical symptoms that define long COVID-19. The authors of the study, which appeared in JAMA Network Open late last week, said the findings came from data collected for clinical purposes from 766 patients enrolled in UCLA's SARS-CoV-2 Ambulatory Program. Read more here.
• Maternal stress and depression amid the COVID-19 pandemic can alter the structure, texture, and other characteristics of the placenta during pregnancy, although the long-term neurodevelopmental impact on children is unknown, according to an ongoing observational study published yesterday in Scientific Reports. Researchers from MedStar Washington Hospital Center and Children's National Hospital in Washington, DC, used magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) to compare the placentas of 63 pregnant women without known COVID-19 exposure during the pandemic with 165 control patients who were pregnant before the pandemic. Read more here.
• The U.S. government on Thursday will end the COVID-19 Public Health Emergency that allowed millions of Americans to receive vaccines, tests and treatments at no cost. The emergency is also tied to telehealth flexibilities, Medicaid enrollment safeguards, and the ability of government health agencies to collect data on the spread of the coronavirus. Here is what will change after Thursday, and what does not. Read more here.

Gun Violence

• In an interview Sunday, Fox News presented Gov. Greg Abbott with a poll that showed Americans overwhelmingly favored background checks and raising the minimum age to buy firearms. But the governor shunned gun safety options in Texas and instead pointed to the need to increase mental health funding. “We are working to address that anger and violence by going to its root cause, which is addressing the mental health problems behind it,” Abbott said. “People want a quick solution. The long-term solution here is to address the mental health issue.” Read more here.  
• Republican mayors rejected progressive criminal justice reforms embraced by their Democratic counterparts, but factors such as inequality and guns are still driving crime in larger conservative cities, experts told Newsweek. The GOP has seized on Democrats' support for criminal justice reform in recent election cycles, arguing these policies lead to higher crime rates in large cities. Instead, Republicans have offered "tough on crime" and pro-police positions that have proved salient, helping them secure control of Congress during the 2022 midterm elections. However, a city's partisan lean generally does not necessarily correlate with its crime rate, according to data compiled by Newsweek.  Read more here.
• President Joe Biden on Sunday called on Congress to pass new gun control legislation and said he would “sign it immediately,” in the wake of a shooting in Allen, Texas, that left at least eight dead and seven injured. “Too many families have empty chairs at their dinner tables. Republican Members of Congress cannot continue to meet this epidemic with a shrug. Tweeted thoughts and prayers are not enough,” Biden said in a statement. “Once again I ask Congress to send me a bill banning assault weapons and high-capacity magazines. Enacting universal background checks. Requiring safe storage. Ending immunity for gun manufacturers.” Read more here.
• Texas Republican Gov. Greg Abbott is calling for more resources for mental health following a mass shooting at an outlet mall in Allen, Texas, on Saturday in which a gunman killed at least eight people. Abbott presented those resources as the solution for the gun violence that has wracked the state in recent years. But there’s little evidence increased funding for mental health services will reduce gun violence. Read more here.
• The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recorded 48,830 U.S. firearm deaths in 2021, the last year for which complete data is available. Those include suicides — which have long accounted for the majority of U.S. gun deaths — as well as homicides. Culturally, suicide is more common in white America and homicide more common in Black America, Prothrow-Stith notes. But she stresses that violence in general is a learned behavior. Read more here.
• In 2020, the Italian native became the first researcher to receive a $2 million federal grant from the National Science Foundation earmarked specifically for gun-related research.  This week he published research on how "fame-seeking" mass shooters choose their locations. He has also published research on why gun owners purchase firearms after a mass shooting and statistical models for predicting monthly U.S. gun homicides. Read more here.

The Opioid Crisis

• For the first time, the U.S. government will pay for a large study measuring whether overdoses can be prevented by so-called safe injection sites, places where people can use heroin and other illegal drugs and be revived if they take too much. The grant provides more than $5 million over four years to New York University and Brown University to study two sites in New York City and one opening next year in Providence, Rhode Island. Read more here.
• An initiative launched by Attorney General Ashley Moody will provide Florida's first responders with free naloxone, a medication that can reverse the effects of an opioid overdose. The “Helping Heroes” program will provide naloxone to law enforcement, firefighters and paramedics at select Walmart pharmacies in Florida, according to a press release from the attorney general‘s office. Moody announced the initiative Tuesday – on National Fentanyl Awareness Day – in Clearwater. Opioids are the main driver of drug overdose deaths in the United States, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. In 2021, there were 80,816 overdose deaths involving opioids. Read more here.

Federal and State Policy

• The bill containing House Republicans’ demands for raising the debt ceiling would impose severe cuts amounting to $3.6 trillion over the next ten years, along with the many other harmful changes it would make. The funding cuts would hit a wide swath of vital programs and would grow from bad to beyond extreme: to between 24 and 59 percent in 2033, depending on whether programs such as defense and veterans’ medical care are protected from cuts, as many House Republicans propose. Read more here.
• Led by House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, congressional Republicans have revived harmful proposals to cut federal spending on the Medicaid program — the nation’s single largest source of health coverage — by taking Medicaid away from people not meeting new work-reporting requirements. Adding such requirements to Medicaid would cause many low-income adults to lose coverage due to bureaucratic hurdles that don’t reflect the complexity of people’s circumstances, as failed experiments in several states show. These requirements would leave people without the health care they need, including life-saving medications, treatment to manage chronic conditions, and care for acute illnesses. Read more here.
• The Republican proposal to require people to work in order to receive Medicaid benefits poses an existential question about the very nature of government assistance: Do you need to do something to earn it? For years, the GOP’s answer has been yes, some people should. These days, they have very specific people in mind: The 19 million Americans, most of them childless and nondisabled adults, who were not eligible for Medicaid until the Affordable Care Act expanded eligibility a decade ago. Read more here.