General Mental Health Issues
- More people died from suicide in the United States last year than any other year on record, dating to at least 1941, according to provisional data from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. At least 49,449 lives were lost due to intentional self-harm in 2022 – more than 14 deaths for every 100,000 people. Men were about four times more likely than women to die by suicide, and rates were highest among senior men. But the suicide rate increased twice as much for women in 2022, with especially significant increases among White women and those ages 25 to 34. Read more here.
- Nationwide, untreated mental illness costs the United States nearly $193 billion in lost earnings every year, according to a 2008 study. Newly published research in Indiana shows the state lost $4.2 billion in 2019 due to untreated mental illness, according to the JAMA Network study. For context, corn, Indiana’s leading commodity, generated $3.8 billion in sales the year before. Indiana lawmakers recently adopted a new law to improve access to mental health care. Still, those efforts are not nearly enough to help hundreds of thousands of people navigate a complex system and find treatment. Read more here.
- Even as resources have been poured into law enforcement agencies for decades to solve well-publicized mental health issues, the same can’t be said for fire departments. The reasons are simple: There isn’t enough money to go around at many cities or volunteer jurisdictions, and many fire departments have not been ready to drop their stigma around mental health. Read more here.
- Thankfully, in recent years, new medicines are emerging that show promising signs of being highly efficacious and with a much-improved safety profile to treat both aspects of the disease—something many of us haven't seen in our lifetimes. These new therapies could finally improve outcomes for schizophrenia patients, and in so doing would have a positive ripple effect on society and open the door to address the side effects of other debilitating diagnoses like Alzheimer's. Read more here.
- Accountable care organizations do not positively influence treatment and outcomes for chronic mental health conditions for Medicare patients, according to a study in Health Affairs. For patients newly enrolled in ACOs, they saw no improvements in their depression and anxiety symptoms after one year. These patients were also 24% less likely to have their depression or anxiety treated than patients unenrolled in ACOs, and 9.8% less likely to have an evaluation and management visit for depression or anxiety with a primary care clinician. Read more here.
- In recent years, phrases like this have become ubiquitous, particularly online: “stressy depressy,” short for stressed and depressed, “menty b,” short for mental breakdown, and “suey,” short for suicidal, are just some of the jokey shorthand people have begun using to talk about mental health and mental illness. But for Dr. Nicholas Westers, a clinical psychologist at Children’s Health in Dallas, simply talking about mental health isn’t always a good thing. And the use of these phrases, he said, can have some downsides. Read more here.
Youth Mental Health
- College students may be at a greater risk of experiencing depression and anxiety compared to young people who are not in higher education, according to a new study published in The Lancet Public Health. Researchers from University College London analyzed data from two studies. Just over half of the participants were attending college. Based on multiple surveys the young people completed about their mental health, there was a small, elevated risk for depression and anxiety among the students compared to the non-students. There was an approximate 6% difference in risk between the two groups. Read more here.
- While rising rates of depression and anxiety among American teens have gotten attention, young adults may be struggling even more with those conditions, according to a new report from the Harvard Graduate School of Education. Approximately 36% of young adults said they struggle with anxiety, compared to 18% of teens. The results were published last week in the report, "On Edge: Understanding and Preventing Young Adults’ Mental Health Challenges," from Making Caring Common (MCC), a project of the Harvard Graduate School of Education. Read more here.
- Elizabeth Marcella says when her son turned five years old, she knew something was wrong. "He was three and four years old and super confident kid and then something changed. It's very overwhelming to reach out to providers or to even have an understanding of what direction do I go in"," she said. After COVID hit she is one of many parents who became deeply concerned about her child's mental health. That's when she discovered Pinnacle Partnerships in Brockton, a non-profit organization that provides resources, education and empowerment to families who are raising kids with mental health needs. Read more here.
- Exactly one year ago, Children’s Minnesota opened its first inpatient mental health unit. It serves children as young as six and is one of the few in the state to admit kids with more complex medical conditions — and also one of the few in the country to allow parents or guardians to stay overnight with their child. Dr. Joel Spalding is a child psychiatrist at Children’s. He joined MPR News host Cathy Wurzer. Read more here.
Veterans and Military Mental Health
- But now, after years of effort, momentum is building in Congress to explore a new path for servicemembers and veterans struggling with psychological illnesses: psychedelics. Current legislative proposals include studies of the effectiveness of using psychedelics to treat PTSD among active-duty servicemembers and veterans, reflecting a small but significant shift among lawmakers’ attitudes toward therapeutic use of the drugs. Read more here.
- While the name of the condition may have changed over the years, its causes and symptoms have not. Also unchanged are the profound stigmatization around it and the lack of treatment that follows. For some, it is hard to believe that the mere sight of a fellow soldier, dismembered and dying, can cause PTSD symptoms in another. Equally challenging to achieve, on a societal level, is the recognition that PTSD is the root cause of complex social problems that plague vets: housing instability, addiction, poverty, food insecurity and suicide. Read more here.
- A grieving father who lost his son -- an airman at Cannon Air Force Base in New Mexico -- to suicide this month has written an open letter to the service's leadership, as well as the Joint Chiefs chairman and defense secretary, pleading for the military to confront alarming numbers of suicides within the ranks. Sean Stevenson said in the Nov. 22 letter that his son, 24-year-old Senior Airman Sean Ryan Stevenson, died Nov. 1 after the Air Force "let him down to the point he became broken and alone." Read more here.
Gun Violence and Mental Health
- Survivors of gun injuries often face a long, painful recovery. When the gun victims are children or teens, family members also struggle. In the year following a firearm injury, child and adolescent survivors endured significant increases in pain, psychiatric and substance use disorders compared to their peers, according to research published Monday in the journal Health Affairs. The mental health of family members also was affected. Read more here.
- U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee Democrats on Tuesday discussed how to treat gun violence as a public health crisis, in hopes of building upon last year’s federal gun safety legislation. “Across the country, gun violence is a public health epidemic,” Illinois Democrat Dick Durbin, the chairman of the committee, said in his opening remarks. Senate Republicans pushed back against framing gun violence as a public health crisis and argued that approach would violate the Second Amendment and that the focus should be on mental health. Read more here.
- Republican Senator John Kennedy of Louisiana was confronted about the high firearms death rate in his home state during a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on gun violence. So far in 2023, over 39,000 people have been killed by firearms in the United States, according to the Gun Violence Archive, an organization that tracks shootings. There have been at least 619 mass shootings and 33 mass murders this year, prompting calls for Congress to strengthen national gun laws, as gun control remains a tensely divided matter in the United States. Proponents of gun control say limiting the ability of individuals to buy some weapons, such as assault rifles, would mitigate the number of shootings. Others, however, say stronger gun laws would impede the U.S. Constitution's Second Amendment. Read more here.
The Opioid Crisis and Addiction Issues
- More than $50 billion will flow into states and municipalities over the next two decades from legal settlements with opioid manufacturers, distributors, and pharmacies accused of fueling the overdose crisis through irresponsible sales of painkillers. There has not been a public health settlement of this scope in the US since the tobacco settlements a quarter century ago. As public health advocates focused on opioids and overdose, we know that this influx of funds represents a once-in-a-generation opportunity to change the way we address substance use in the United States. Read more here.
988 Hotline
- U.S Rep. Marc Molinaro (NY-19) today urged the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to implement technology that reroutes calls to the National 988 Crisis Lifeline to local call centers. Unlike 911 calls, which are routed to a local call center based on the caller’s current location, 988 calls are routed based on a person’s area code. If someone moves or travels, their call to 988 could be sent to a call center hundreds of miles away. 988 is not as effective if the person answering a call is unfamiliar with the caller’s location and cannot provide accurate, local resources. Read more here.
- Introduced almost 18 months ago, the 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline has ushered in a new era with the potential for major transformation in how behavioral healthcare is approached and delivered. In its initial month of operation, July 2022, the lifeline responded to about 354,000 calls. By contrast, in September 2023, it responded to 439,000 calls, an increase of more than 24%. As it develops, it is important that we know more about those who are using the lifeline and how they are responding. Read more here.
Social Isolation and Loneliness
- Sen. Chris Murphy, D-Conn., knows talking about loneliness is not the most natural fit for a lawmaker. But he knew he was on to something after receiving an overwhelming response from constituents to an op-ed he wrote for a conservative news website. “I got more feedback from that piece in Connecticut than anything else that I’ve written in the last five years,” Murphy said about his op-ed for The Bulwark. Read more here.
Health Insurance
- Particularly in the last few years, it has been the states, using the tools made available by them by the ACA, that have been chipping away most aggressively at the number of uninsured. Today, 10 states have an uninsured rate below 5 percent — not quite universal coverage, but getting close. Other states may be hovering around the national average, but that still represents a dramatic improvement from the pre-ACA reality: In New Mexico, for instance, 23 percent of its population was uninsured in 2010; now just 8 percent is. Read more here.
- Christmas has come early for Democratic campaign staffers, courtesy of former President Trump's vow over the holiday weekend to "never give up" on repealing and replacing the Affordable Care Act (ACA). Why it matters: Democrats are eager to revive their health care playbook from 2018, when the party rode a "blue wave" to the House majority by aggressively campaigning on Republican attempts to gut Obamacare. Read more here.
Research
- People born in the 1990s have the worst mental health of any generation before them — and the millennials are not recovering as they age, a new study shows. Researchers at the University of Sydney found that there has been a noticeable deterioration in the mental welfare of each successive generation since the 1950s.The results indicate that mental health challenges not only affect younger generations more seriously but are impacting each generation that is inching toward old age, according to the study published Tuesday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Read more here.
Federal and State Policy
- Gov. Gavin Newsom is trying to finish the job Ronald Reagan started more than half a century ago as he seeks to transform California’s mental health system — even if it means forcing some people into treatment. In the last few months, the state established a court intervention program for people with severe mental illness and passed a law making it easier for relatives and first responders to send people to mandatory treatment. But the biggest potential development will be up to voters: In March, they’ll decide on a $6.4 billion bond proposal Newsom has pitched as part of his plan to build nearly 25,000 psychiatric and addiction beds statewide. Read more here.
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