But first, MindSite News is thrilled to be included — again — in a new cohort of newsrooms awarded grants through CatchLight’s mental health initiative to produce high-impact, visually rich solutions-oriented stories. Our first project, When Ice Ruptures Families, was republished by El País, LA Public Press, LA Local/Boyle Heights Beat, Newsbreak, Palabra, American Community Media, and The Imprint, and written up in KQED; it is also available to readers in both English and Spanish. Read CatchLight’s announcement of the new grants here.

Next, we’re partnering with our friends at San Francisco Public Press to examine the mental health challenges that neurodivergent people face at work, and spotlight how employers are building more supportive workplaces.

You cannot make football safe for a child’s brain, but you can make it safer

Football season has begun and I, like so many Americans, am preparing to watch. In fact, I’ve already signed up for the fantasy league my cousins and I have run for nearly 20 years. It’s a ritual about which I feel more ambivalent with each passing season, as I learn more about the unavoidable risks the sport poses to its players’ mental health. Every fall, parents of football players sit with a heavier version of that unease. On one side of the scales, they weigh what the game gives their child: friendships with teammates, the discipline of a training routine, the community that grows among families gathering on a brisk Saturday morning. On the other lies a potentially life-threatening disease with no known cure.

CTE (short for chronic traumatic encephalopathy) is a neurodegenerative disease caused by repeated concussive and subconcussive blows to the head. Though most often associated with football, it has turned up in athletes across other sports where repetitive blows are common, including boxing and some martial arts, ice hockey, rugby, soccer, wrestling and bobsledding.

For years, CTE was understood as a disease of the aging professional — diagnosed in the brains of Hall of Famers whose lives unraveled decades after their last snap or tackle. But the New York Times recently reported on a study of former NFL players who died between 2016 and 2021, with astonishing results. Of the 878 who died in that span, the families of 235 donated their brains for examination, and researchers found CTE in 215 of the donated brains — enough to conclude that at least one in four of all of the deceased players had the disease. The real figure is almost certainly higher: CTE can only be diagnosed post mortem, and the other 643 brains were never examined.

Even more unsettling is the finding that, in 2023 Boston University researchers, examined the brains of 152 contact-sport athletes who died before age 30 and found that over 40% had CTE. Most of them had played their sports at the high school or college levels.

For parents of children who love the game, the grim finding carries a strange sliver of hope. “We know what’s causing it,” said Dr. Daniel Daneshvar, the chief of brain injury rehabilitation at Spaulding Rehabilitation Hospital and a professor at Harvard, who led the 2026 study, which was published in BMJ. “It’s a neurodegenerative disease where we know and have complete control over the risk. And understanding the extent of that risk is one of the steps into making sure that we can mitigate and decrease that risk.”

Families whose children aren’t going to give up the game have to accept that the protection isn’t in the equipment — no helmet, mouthguard or supplement has been shown to lower CTE risk, no matter what the box promises. Safety lies in limiting exposure to blows to the head, and the two levers that matter most are simple: fewer years of contact and fewer hits within those years. That means delaying tackle football in favor of flag leagues for younger kids, and pushing for safer practices without full contact. The Ivy League, for instance, banned full-contact practices years ago, and even the NFL has moved to limit them in order to cut down on injuries, including head injuries.

The rest is vigilance. Be wary of any coach or parent with a “play through it” mentality. Brain injuries don’t announce themselves like broken bones, and kids must feel safe speaking up. Young players are especially vulnerable to second-impact syndrome, when a second blow lands before the first has healed and the brain swells past what the skull can hold — a chain that can sometimes end in coma or death.

None of these makes the sport safe, but It does make it safer. For a parent doing the math in the bleachers, that difference is the whole game.

Are we reaching people in crisis — or just counting the ones who call? 

The U.S. has invested heavily in behavioral health crisis response since the passage of the American Rescue Plan Act in 2021, launching the 988 Lifeline, expanding mobile crisis teams and clinics and, most recently, releasing $700 million in grant funds previously approved by Congress to combat addiction and homelessness resulting from untreated mental illness. 

Whether any unresolved issues remain unaddressed is a vital inquiry that Dr. Andrew Anderson, associate director at Partners for Advancing Health Equity at the Tulane School of Public Health and Tropical Medicine and a professor in the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, is exploring through his current research. 

Research shows that plenty of people reach out for resources and support, but a blind spot remains, Anderson argues in an op-ed for The Milbank Quarterly. Tracking how many people in crisis asked for help doesn’t measure how many of those who needed assistance actually received it. Worrying preliminary analyses suggest that the gap is wide.

 In a 2025 nationally representative survey that Anderson helped administer, 8.9% of U.S. adults reported experiencing what they considered a mental health crisis within the past year. Among those who sought help, most turned to doctors, family or friends — fewer than one in five called the 988 hotline.

Anderson’s suggested fix is to apply the concept of “effective coverage,” derived from other sectors of healthcare, to mental health. It examines whether help was requested and whether the care they received had its intended effect. The deeper examination reveals more about the people who never call — because they don’t know 988 exists, can’t access care due to language or location barriers or fear police (or ICE) showing up to their door.

 “The United States is rapidly building a national behavioral health crisis system,” Anderson writes. “Until it measures crisis coverage from need through response, resolution, and continuity, it will know how busy its crisis services are, but not whether those investments are reaching the people they are intended to serve.” That’s a gap in care that needs to change. 

In other news…

Amid scrutiny about its safety for youth, OpenAI launched ChatGPT for Teens, automatically enrolling users who report being 13 to 17. For adolescent users, the app claims to pair learning tools — including quizzes, homework reminders and study mode — with safety features that limit exposure to harmful content and time spent on the app. “Teens should be able to use AI to learn, create, and explore,” the company wrote in a blog post last month, but “that access should come with protections that reflect their developmental stage.”

The move follows mounting pressure, the Los Angeles Times reported. OpenAI is being sued by parents of a California teen who died by suicide after ChatGPT allegedly told him how to carry it out, and added parental controls last year in response. But the tools can only help, to whatever degree, if adults use them. 

Roughly 70% of U.S. teens say that a teacher has never discussed safe AI use with them, according to a survey from the Youth AI Safety Institute. What’s more, a recent survey from Pew found that 42% of parents haven’t talked to their kids about chatbots at all. If you need support with starting the conversation, Common Sense Media, home to the Youth AI Safety Institute, has free resources for parents and teachers that may help.