Mental Health Weekly最新文献

Mental Health America (MHA) last week released its 10th consecutive report on the state of mental health in this country revealing concerning, although not new, trends such as the high rates of mental distress among youths and low rates of mental health care access available to them. The report represents a collection of data across all 50 states and the District of Columbia and serves as a baseline for answering some questions about how many people in America need and have access to mental health services.

Mental Health America is holding its annual meeting, “Disrupt. Reform. Transform,” Sept. 19–21 in Washington, D.C. Visit https://www.mhanational.org/annual-conference for more information.

Recently released data from Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine revealed that nearly 20% of suicides in Illinois between 2020 and 2021 occurred among people aged 65 years or older. The trend is consistent with the data from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's (CDC) newly released National Violent Death Reporting System's Surveillance Summary.

New York's largest integrated health system is leveraging technology to offer greater mental health support to its employees, using a different approach from efforts it believes have fallen short nationally in engaging individuals who need services.

Experiencing gratitude is beneficial for physical health and emotional well-being, past research has shown, CNN reported on July 12. Now, a new study has found that those who experience more gratitude also have better odds of living longer. The report is the first to examine the effects of gratefulness on longevity, experts said. The researchers used data from the Nurses' Health Study, which included nearly 50,000 older, female U.S. registered nurses between ages 69 and 96 who completed a six-item gratitude questionnaire in 2016. By asking participants to rank how strongly they agreed with statements such as “I have so much in life to be thankful for” and “I am grateful to a wide variety of people,” the research team was able to determine the percentage of women who had the highest and lowest feelings of gratitude. When the researchers reviewed the data three years later, they found that the women who had the highest levels of gratitude experienced a 9% lower risk of death of any cause, including cardiovascular disease, cancer and neurodegenerative disease, according to the study published July 3 in JAMA Psychiatry. “Gratitude is powerful: powerful for happiness, powerful for addressing at least more minor depressive symptoms, powerful for improving health, powerful for protecting against premature death — and it is something that anyone can do,” said senior study author Dr. Tyler VanderWeele, who is the John L. Loeb and Frances Lehman Loeb Professor of Epidemiology at the Harvard T. H. Chan School of Public Health in Boston.

The Kansas Department of Health and Environment (KDHE) and Kansas Medicaid secured $2.5 million for school-based services, including funding for in-school mental health services, increased outreach and enrolling more families in Medi-caid, the nonprofit news outlet, Kansas Reflector, reported on July 19. The goal of the grant, announced by KDHE on June 25, is to increase Medicaid health care services for children and their families within schools, which now includes services specifically for mental health. The United Methodist Health Ministry Fund spent two months applying for the grant, as well as gathering support and research from other organizations around Kansas. “This is really a win for all schools across the state,” said David Jordan, president of the organization. “It will help modernize Kansas schools' Medicaid program and open up an opportunity for schools to be reimbursed and offer new services to more kids.” Rather than give potential resources to families, the grant will allow for students to get a wide variety of health care services right in their own school. “This will help more children get access to health care services by accessing the services during the school day,” said KDHE spokeswoman Jill Bronaugh. “After the school day ends, families may not have transportation, know where the services are or the support to access the needed services. When health care services are delivered during the school day, it normalizes the experience for the child.”

Families of former inmates and medical college researchers are trying to get a mental health illness named a public health crisis, Cincinnati's Spectrum News 1 reported on July 23. Researchers at the University of Cincinnati are working on a study that surrounds ‘post-incarceration syndrome' or PICS. For years, Chazidy Robinson — the former wife of a prison inmate — said she was bogged down by prison walls that you can't see. “My life revolved around him so much, that in eight years, all I did was answer phone calls, did things that he needed for me to do,” Robinson told Spectrum News 1. It was her then-husband who was locked up, but she said she felt the impact when he got out. Now divorced, she's on a new mission, to send a warning about what she went through. She said she had symptoms of a little-known mental health disorder. “People are being diagnosed right now by a therapist, by a social worker, by a psychologist, because you're saying they have PTSD [post-traumatic stress disorder]. No, I don't, I have post-incarceration syndrome,” Robinson told Spectrum News 1. PICS became the focus of a new idea that she brought to the University of Cincinnati. She went straight to researcher and associate professor in the University of Cincinnati College of Medicine, Rachael Nolan, Ph.D. MPH. Together they got to work on a study of former inmates, their families and those symptoms of PICS. Nolan said they're trying to get more families into the four-year study and use that information to get PICS named a public health crisis.

Acknowledging that the field of psychology has had a long history of committing harm against people of color and asserting that psychologists must work to dismantle racism within the field, the American Psychological Association (APA) last week published a special issue on these concerns in its journal American Psychologist.

An effort modeled after the Crisis Intervention Training (CIT) that law enforcement officers receive is equipping other criminal justice system professionals in Collier County, Florida, with knowledge to improve their interactions with individuals who have serious mental illness and/or substance use disorders.

This month's announcement of a $2.5 million federal investment to develop multistate health provider licensure compacts signals a continued and significant push to embrace telehealth as a key vehicle for easing the workforce shortage in mental health and other health disciplines.