Advocates hail the settlement as a victory for mentally ill people and as a major step to reducing jail populations and improving conditions for those who remain.
Climate change is expected to increase the severity and frequency of wildfires and other environmental disasters. San Francisco Public Press spoke with Robin Cooper, a psychiatrist and co-founder of the Climate Psychiatry Alliance, about what needs to be done locally to address climate change’s mental health toll.
"We're in the midst of the largest drop of life expectancy that we've faced as a city and country in a century. COVID, obviously, is one explanation. But there are many other reasons – overdoses, rising rates of chronic illness, premature deaths from birth inequities, increased rates of violence, suicide. All these link to mental health, either directly, like overdoses, or indirectly. We need to start looking at mental health as a cross-cutting issue that often manifests in conditions or causes of death we would otherwise not refer to as mental health. We have to see it almost in the groundwater."
Websites for mental health crisis resources across the country – which promise anonymity for visitors – have been quietly sending sensitive visitor data to Facebook, The Markup has found.
Eleven startup companies graduated form a 10-week accelerator program – and each got a $100,000 investment from One Mind, a nonprofit working to develop better treatments for mental illnesses. The goal is to launch a new set of companies that can address some of the most urgent unmet needs in mental health.
War isn’t only about bombs, bullets and deaths on the battlefield. It's also about people away from the fighting, struggling to maintain a modicum of normalcy and hope in their daily lives. In this three-part series, we learn about the lives of people living away from the front line and we hear from a Ukrainian psychologist about the effect the war is having on people's mental health and the strategies they can take to protect themselves.
Almost a year after the launch of the 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline, only 13% of U.S. residents know the line exists and what it’s for – and many of those who do know are afraid that calling it will summon the police, according to a new survey.
Summer Oriyavong first heard the ringing bells and tapping sounds in her head when she was in middle school. Whispering voices and shadowy visions soon followed. When she ran out of her classroom in terror one day, her teachers and parents realized she needed help they couldn’t provide. The 16-year-old became the fortunate beneficiary of mental health care from an early psychosis program. But such programs only serve about one in 10 of the adolescents and young adults who need them.
When the federal COVID-19 Public Health Emergency comes to an end May 11, people will be able to continue getting prescriptions for drugs that treat ADHD, opioid use disorder and other conditions from medical providers via telehealth for as many as 18 more months.
Trauma, abuse, and mental health problems can make people more vulnerable to violent extremism. Here’s how a movement founded in part by former white supremacists is helping extricate Americans from violent hate groups.
Employees at the Jackson County Jail in Indiana locked a man having a psychotic episode in solitary confinement for three weeks – without care or toilet access – until he died of malnutrition. Surveillance footage over 21 days shows him screaming; rocking back and forth and licking the walls.
It's not just teenagers being pushed out of schools. Research suggests pre-schoolers may be most likely to be transferred out as a form of punishment.
Thousands of California students are being transferred for disciplinary reasons – with little or no legal protection. The transfers are demoralizing, advocates say. “Any disruption to a child’s education program is a problem," said Chelsea Helena, an attorney at Neighborhood Legal Services of Los Angeles County.
Gov. Gavin Newsom is proposing to shift the use of mental health dollars raised by a state tax on millionaires. He wants to move some funds toward housing for severely mentally ill people living on the street. Some mental health advocates fear the change will cut funding for children's and community-based services and prevention – "robbing Peter to pay Paul," as one agency director put it.
Las Cruces has become the latest city in New Mexico to start a program using mental health workers instead of police to respond to people in crisis. A similar program in Albuquerque, started in 2020, has not led to a reduction in police shootings of people with mental illness.
Since 2019, 12 states have passed legislation to allow students to take excused days off from school for their mental health. A few, such as New York and Maryland, have bills pending. Reporters for Youthcast Media interviewed their peers and professionals for their views on the idea.
A review of practices inside Cook County's temporary juvenile detention center found dangerous forms of restraint and isolation, failure to keep adequate records, and “inhumane” treatment of incarcerated teenagers. Many of them struggle with learning disabilities and mental health conditions.
In 2015, Los Angeles County launched an effort to keep people with mental and physical health needs out of the county’s jails. Officials trumpeted it as a new era for justice in the most populated county in the U.S. Instead, the number of mentally ill has exploded, even as the overall jail census has fallen.
Naheim Banks' mental health journey began in the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic. His father, seeing him buried in school work, said he looked like a painting of a man with the world on his shoulders. This week, Banks took part in a roundtable at the White House focused on drawing attention to the mental health crisis among young Black men.
Exercise of various sorts and durations was more effective than either medication or psychotherapy and “should be a mainstay approach in the management of depression, anxiety and psychological distress.”
Some 7.5 million people were arrested in the U.S. in 2020, and more than 10 million people were arrested each year in the 2010s. Now a new study looking at three of those years, 2017 to 2019, finds that one in nine of all arrests was of a person grappling with both a mental health and substance use disorder.
Four years ago, Stockton conducted a nationally-watched experiment, giving 125 households $500 a month with no strings attached. Today, dozens of programs throughout California are testing the idea of a guaranteed income. It's the largest modern U.S. experiment in unrestricted cash payments: More than 12,000 Californians expected to receive more than $180 million in public and private funds.
Californians once again have named mental health as a top priority for the state’s political leaders to address – and they are deeply concerned about other people’s mental health, as well as their own. Many said they had trouble finding a provider who took their insurance or waited too long for an appointment.
The feeling of being ignored or dismissed in medical and mental health settings is common, but it is particularly prevalent among older adults. Some older people are infantilized by mental health providers. And real issues may be downplayed.
For the second year in a row, mental health played a leading role in a State of the Union message delivered by President Joe Biden.
Take our reader survey and help shape MindSite News reporting
