Trump held a lavish Great Gatsby party as he let SNAP benefits expire

Forty-two million Americans lost their SNAP benefits (formerly known as food stamps) on November 1, 2025. Some commentators have wrongly attributed this to the government shutdown, but the Trump administration chose to cut off food aid. The U.S. government typically continues to fund food benefits during government shutdowns, and has the authority to use contingency funds to do so – in fact, the first Trump administration did just that in 2019.

But this year, in the hours before SNAP benefits were scheduled to expire, Trump was busy hosting a lavish Great Gatsby party at Mar-a-Lago. “What kind of tone-deaf Marie Antoinette sh** is this, flaunting the obscene wealth of the ruling class while ordinary Americans are hurting,” wrote satirist Jeff Tiedrich on his Substack.

Teidrich noted that although Trump is normally quick to do what he wants without consulting legal authority – remember the now-defunct East Wing of the White House? – he claimed to be helpless when it came to feeding fellow Americans. “Our Government lawyers do not think we have the legal authority to pay SNAP with certain monies we have available,” he said on Truth Social, but added: “If we are given the appropriate legal direction by the Court, it will BE MY HONOR to provide the funding.”

Citing the post, U.S. District Judge John J. McConnell Jr. of Rhode Island provided that direction – “Here’s the ORDER and here’s the legal direction from the Court” – ordering the government to restore the funding.

McConnell said the Nov. 1 SNAP benefits should be restored as quickly as possible to  “alleviate the irreparable harm” that withdrawing them causes. Yesterday the administration announced that benefits would restart after a delay, but at half the normal amount.

With SNAP Benefits Delayed, Fountain House Clubhouses Scramble to Feed Hungry Members

The impact of eliminating food benefits is particularly grave for SNAP beneficiaries grappling with mental illness. The National Institute of Health found that psychological distress among heads of household dropped after they participated in SNAP for six months, concluding that support for federal nutrition programs “may reduce the public health burden of mental illness.”

One group of people stepping up to help are the members and staff of Fountain House, an organization founded 77 years ago. The original Fountain House, located in Manhattan’s Hell’s Kitchen neighborhood, became a model for hundreds more “clubhouses” – where people with serious mental illness can gather together and support each other. 

Since the vast majority of Fountain House members depend on SNAP payments, that mutual support is now being focused on a critical task: ensuring that all members get the food they need. Members from clubhouses in Hell’s Kitchen, Harlem, the Bronx and the Hollywood neighborhood of Los Angeles – along with affiliated clubhouses in other states – are stepping up their efforts to provide meals to members who need them. 

MindSite News Editor Rob Waters spoke with members and staff of Fountain House programs and affiliates to learn more about how they are caring for each other. As Shawn Guffey, a member of the education employment unit and community programming and facilities team, told us, “Once it became clear that SNAP benefits were going to be cut off, the question was never will we make sure that the members of our community have food to eat. It was how will we?”

“Fountain House has been around since 1948,” Guffey added, “and we’ve been through wars and pandemics and terrorist attacks and there’s never been a question that we are not going to take care of one another.”

Click here to read our interview with Fountain House members and staffers. 

The US psychiatric system could really use more psychologists

An op-ed published earlier this month in JAMA Psychiatry argues that our nation’s mental health system is underfunded, understaffed, and disconnected – strained further by soaring requests for help. Authors Alexandra Moussa-Tooks, Adam Kuczynski, and Leah Gilbertson say that leads to a heavy reliance on medication and risk management, rather than interventions trying to solve the psychological and social problems that lead to behavioral crises in the first place. An over-reliance on medication obstructs pathways to recovery, they argue, not only lowering people’s faith in the help that does exist, but also increasing the risk of self-harm and suicide for patients after discharge. 

Psychologists, they say, are critical to changing these circumstances for the better. Though psychologists are frequently excluded from standard inpatient staffing models at psychiatric hospitals in the US, their specialized training equips them to address needs that medicine alone cannot. It also empowers them to ease the burden on psychiatrists, nurses, and social workers, improving work conditions and morale. 

Reports in the United Kingdom and on specialized units in the U.S. where psychologists have been integrated into care show better experiences and health outcomes for patients, improved well-being for providers, and reduced costs on the system overall. But for that to work in the US, they write, more has to happen – namely pivoting the system from a focus on administration and billing goals to effective treatment, helping health systems understand the crucial need for psychologists on inpatient units, and convincing insurers and lawmakers to rewrite reimbursement structures to support psychological services.
– Courtney Wise

In other news….

Shock and anxiety soar over new health premiums, as subsidy expiration looms: A lot of us are getting sticker shock over our new health premiums, which are set to go up in January thanks to expiring subsidies. In Juniper, Florida, Lauren Koff got a notice that her monthly premium would climb by more than $780, soaring from $244 to $1,026 a month. “I cried off and on for a good hour, tried to keep myself from going into a full-blown panic attack,” she told a WPTV reporter. “I was expecting my cost to maybe double to go up to $500, maybe at the most $600,” Koff said. “To see it over $1,000 was beyond shocking.”

Koff relies on the Affordable Care Act for coverage – more than 90% of marketplace enrollees benefit from subsidies that are due to expire in January. Combined with an average 26% price rise, those enrollees may end up paying 114% more on average if subsidies are left to expire. Notably, more than one in six Marketplace enrollees had at least one mental health diagnosis on a health care claim dating back to 2022.

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Massive new open data source on brain development and mental health disorders. A collaborative team, led by researchers from the Perelman School of Medicine and the Child Mind Institute, has created Reproducible Brain Charts, a  resource for mapping brain development and mental health disorders, Penn Today reports. The dataset draws from five large studies on brain development in children and young adults – it compiles de-identified brain scans and mental health assessments into a publicly-available research resource, already downloaded nearly 4,000 times.

“To create this big data resource, we did all the painful, unsexy stuff – data organization, image processing, and quality assurance,” Theodore Satterthwaite, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania and director of the Penn Lifespan Informatics and Neuroimaging Center (PennLINC) said in a press release. “We just all put it together in one convenient place, accompanied by a website with simple instructions on how to get the data. This resource makes it really easy to look at brain development using massive samples of easy-to-use, de-identified data.” The team’s resource was published in Neuron.