Publications on Mental Health Topics

Facebook will try to 'nudge' teens away from harmful content, by Susan Cornwell, Reuters, Oct 11 2021.

“WASHINGTON, Oct 10 (Reuters) - A Facebook Inc (FB.O) executive said Sunday that the company would introduce new measures on its apps to prompt teens away from harmful content, as U.S lawmakers scrutinize how Facebook and subsidiaries like Instagram affect young people's mental health. Nick Clegg, Facebook's vice president of global affairs, also expressed openness to the idea of letting regulators have access to Facebook algorithms that are used to amplify content. But Clegg said he could not answer the question whether its algorithms amplified the voices of people who had attacked the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6. ”

Anxiety, depression fluctuated with COVID-19 waves: Study, by Kiara Alfonseca, ABC News, Oct 10 2021.

“The COVID-19 pandemic has had a major impact on the mental health of the nation, according to a new study published in the Center for Disease Control and Prevention's weekly journal, MMWR. The CDC said that social isolation, coronavirus-related deaths and stress weighed heavy on Americans, forcing many to confront new mental health challenges. ”

Why It’s So Hard to Find a Therapist Who Takes Insurance, by Andrea Petersen, The Wall Street Journal, Oct 5 2021.

“Finding a therapist who takes insurance was tough before the pandemic. Now, therapists and patients say, an increase in the need for mental-health care is making the search even harder. Especially in big cities such as Los Angeles, New York and Washington, D.C., demand for mental-health care is so strong that many experienced therapists don’t accept any insurance plans, they say. They can easily fill their practices with patients who would pay out of pocket, they add. Therapists who do take insurance are often booked up. And in many smaller towns and rural areas, there are few mental-health professionals at all. Finding a provider who takes insurance, or lowering your rates in other ways, is possible but often takes legwork that can be draining when you are already grappling with mental-health issues. About 34% of people with private insurance said they had difficulty finding a therapist who would accept their coverage, according to a 2016 survey—the most recent data available—of more than 3,100 participants conducted by the National Alliance on Mental Illness, a national mental-health advocacy group. By comparison, 9% said they had difficulty finding an in-network primary-care provider.  Office visits to mental-health providers are more than five times more likely to be out of network than are visits to primary-care providers, according to a 2019 report from Milliman, a consulting firm, which analyzed insurance-claims data. In 2017, 17.2% of mental-health office visits were out of network, compared with 3.2% of primary-care visits, the Milliman report found. ”

Suicide rate among active duty service members increased by 41% between 2015 and 2020, by Alex Marquardt and Ellie Kaufman, CNN, Sep 30 2021.

“The suicide rate among active duty service members in the US military increased by 41.4% in the five years from 2015 to 2020, according to data provided in the annual report from the Department of Defense on suicide in the military.  The suicide rate among active duty service members increased by 9.1% in 2020, according to data from the report, which was released Thursday. From 2018 to 2020, it rose 15.3%.  The suicide rate among reserve members of the US military went up by 19.2% in 2020, but the rate has overall gone down since 2018, the report shows. The suicide rate among National Guard members increased by 31.7% in 2020, but has also gone down overall since 2018.  Some 580 members of the military, among active duty, reserves and National Guard, died by suicide in 2020. The report also shows 202 military family members died by suicide in 2019. ”

Find your sleep 'sweet spot' to protect your brain as you age, study suggests, by Kristen Rogers, CNN, Sep 26 2021.

“How long older adults sleep could affect their brain health, according to a study published Monday in the journal JAMA Neurology.  Disrupted sleep is common in late life, the study authors wrote, and associated with changes in cognitive function -- the mental capacity for learning, thinking, reasoning, problem-solving, decision-making, remembering and paying attention.  Age-related changes in sleep have also been linked with early signs of Alzheimer's disease, depression and cardiovascular disease, so the authors investigated possible associations between self-reported sleep duration, demographic and lifestyle factors, subjective and objective cognitive function, and participants' levels of beta amyloid.  Those in the study who reported short sleep duration -- defined in the study as six hours or less -- had elevated levels of beta amyloid, which "greatly increases" risk for dementia, said the study's lead author Joe Winer, a postdoctoral research fellow at Stanford University in California, via email. ”

How to Detect Your Child’s Emotional Distress Before the School’s AI Does, by Julie Jargon, The Wall Street Journal, Sep 18 2021.

“School districts use artificial-intelligence software that can scan student communications and web searches on school-issued devices—and even devices that are logged in via school networks—for signs of suicidal ideation, violence against fellow students, bullying and more. Included in the scans are emails and chats between friends, as well as student musings composed in Google Docs or Microsoft Word. Many school districts have used monitoring software over the past three years to prevent school shootings, but it has evolved to become a tool to spot a range of mental-health issues, including anxiety, depression and eating disorders. School administrators say such surveillance is more important than ever as students return to the classroom after 18 months of pandemic-related stress, uncertainty and loss. Critics say it raises questions about privacy, misuse and students’ ability to express feelings freely or search for answers. ”

College students reported record-high marijuana use and record-low drinking in 2020, study says, by Maria Luisa Paul, The Washington Post, Sep 13 2021.

“A newly released study found that nearly half of the country’s college-age students said they consumed marijuana last year, leading researchers to wonder whether the pandemic may have spurred the record in cannabis consumption. One says the trend underpins the changing practices during — and struggles to adapt to — the global health crisis.  “The pandemic seems to have actually made marijuana into an alternative to escape the monotony of isolation,” said Nora Volkow, director of the federal government’s National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA). “It’s made life become more boring, more stressful. So if drugs let you experience that completely different mental state, I wonder whether that would be a factor that leads people to use them.” ”

Good Anxiety Does Exist. Here's How You Can Benefit From It, by Meghan Keane and Claire Marie Schneider, NPR, Sep 9 2021.

“Anxiety can feel like the enemy. However it shows up — a tightness in the chest, a knot in the stomach — it's easy to want to obliterate those feelings.  But according to Wendy Suzuki, that might not be the best approach.  "Anxiety evolved to help protect us," says Suzuki, a professor of neural science and psychology at the Center for Neural Science at New York University. "We need to recalibrate our level of anxiety to get it back to that level where it is superprotective for us."  Suzuki wants us to make friends with our anxiety and reap all the gifts it can offer.  In her new book, Good Anxiety: Harnessing the Power of the Most Misunderstood Emotion, Suzuki outlines strategies to turn that sinking feeling into something productive. Anxiety, she says, is trying to give us information about what we appreciate and what we value in our lives. ”

Black Kids In California More Likely To Be Hospitalized For Police-Related Injuries, by Deepa Shivaram, NPR, Sep 9 2021.

“A new study out of California shows that Black boys and girls are hospitalized from police violence at a rate far higher than their white peers.  The researchers from the University of California, Berkeley looked into injuries of children and teens caused by law enforcement between 2005-2017. They used data from emergency department visits and inpatients hospitalizations in the state of California.  Black boys ages 15-19 had the highest rate of hospitalization due to police violence, but the widest racial gap existed in the 10-14 age group. Black boys and girls ages 10-14 are injured at 5.3 and 6.7 times, respectively, the rate for white boys and girls, the study says.  "These findings suggest that the protections of childhood are not afforded to all children and contribute to evidence on policing as a pathway through which structural racism operates in young people's lives," said Kriszta Farkas, one of the researchers. ”

6 Tips For Coping With COVID Anxiety This Fall And Winter, by April Fulton, NPR, Sep 4 2021.

“As the days get shorter and nights longer, the delta variant of the coronavirus is still very much with us, sad to say. It's already clear the next couple of seasons won't be the "life as usual" we all hoped for.  "People have a lot of frustration. People have been doing this a long time, and they thought by now things would be in a different position," says Vickie Mays, a psychology professor at the University of California, Los Angeles.  We're likely to see pockets of outbreaks and increased restrictions again with every surge in local cases and hospitalizations, says Dr. Preeti Malani, an infectious disease professor at the University of Michigan. And that's leaving some of us feeling a little anxious, to say the least. ”

Grief-induced anxiety: Calming the fears that follow loss, by Jessica DuLong, CNN, Jul 18 2021.

“Millions of Americans are grieving loved ones taken by Covid-19. Yet even outside of a pandemic — with its staggering losses of lives, homes, economic security and normalcy — grief is hard work.  “The funny thing about grief is that no one ever feels like they’re doing it the right way,” said therapist Claire Bidwell Smith, author of “Anxiety: The Missing Stage of Grief.” But there is no right way, she insisted. The only “wrong” way is to not do it.  What often trips people up is misattributing the sensations of grief-related anxiety to some unrelated cause. “Probably 70% of my clients have gone into the hospital for a panic attack following a big loss,” Smith said. ”

Root of teen empathy begins with secure relationships at home, study finds, by Sarah Molano, CNN, Jul 15 2021.

“Teenagers who have close, secure relationships with their families are more likely to extend empathy to their peers, according to a new study.  More specifically, when teens feel safe, supported by and connected to parents or other adult caregivers, they are better equipped to pass the empathy they receive on to others.  "I don't think teens in particular like being told what to do, and I don't think it's going to work to tell teens they should empathize with other people," said Jessica Stern, lead author of the study and a postdoctoral fellow in the department of psychology at the University of Virginia. "But what does work is showing them empathy, and they can pay it forward to the people in their lives." ”

How men hurt and grieve over miscarriage, too, by Matt Villano, CNN, Jul 15 2021.

“What scientists do know: About 10% to 20% of known pregnancies end in miscarriage, at least according to the Mayo Clinic. Many obstetricians and other experts say this number likely is even higher, since many miscarriages occur so early in a woman's pregnancy that some women don't realize they are pregnant at all.  Typically, because women are the ones carrying the fetus, miscarriages are perceived to be biopsychosocial in nature — that is, they affect moms biologically, psychologically and socially.  But fathers experience acute loss as well, said Kate Kripke, founder and director of the Postpartum Wellness Center in Boulder, Colorado. Theirs is psychosocial, without the biology. ”

U.S. drug overdose deaths rise 30% to record during pandemic, by Julie Steenhuysen and Daniel Trotta, Reuters, Jul 14 2021.

“A record number of Americans died of drug overdoses last year as pandemic lockdowns made getting treatment difficult and dealers laced more drugs with a powerful synthetic opioid, according to data released on Wednesday and health officials.  U.S. deaths from drug overdoses leapt nearly 30% to more than 93,000 in 2020 - the highest ever recorded.  "During the pandemic, a lot of (drug) programs weren't able to operate. Street-level outreach was very difficult. People were very isolated," said Dr. Joshua M. Sharfstein, a health policy expert at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in Baltimore. ”

Cash for Kids Comes to the United States, by Annie Lowrey, The Atlantic, Jul 14 2021.

“Beginning this week, the IRS will start sending monthly, no-strings-attached cash payments to an estimated 65 million children living in low- and middle-income families, potentially slashing the country’s child poverty rate by 45 percent.  The new policy will become tangible when money starts hitting bank accounts this week. An estimated 88 percent of recipients will not need to do anything to get the cash—the IRS will send the money automatically. But an estimated 4 million to 8 million eligible children are at risk of missing out, because their parents or guardians do not need to file taxes or are not filing taxes—and because they might not even know the complicated, obscure-sounding, and scarcely advertised policy exists. ”