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☆ Are We Talking Too Much About Mental Health?
▼ + stars: | 2024-05-06 | by ( Ellen Barry | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

In recent years, mental health has become a central subject in childhood and adolescence. School systems, alarmed by rising levels of distress and self-harm, are introducing preventive coursework in emotional self-regulation and mindfulness. Now, some researchers warn that we are in danger of overdoing it. Mental health awareness campaigns, they argue, help some young people identify disorders that badly need treatment — but they have a negative effect on others, leading them to over-interpret their symptoms and see themselves as more troubled than they are. And new research from the United States shows that among young people, “self-labeling” as having depression or anxiety is associated with poor coping skills, like avoidance or rumination.

Organizations: United States Locations: United Kingdom, Australia, United

☆ A Fresh Approach to a Crisis
▼ + stars: | 2024-05-06 | by ( Ellen Barry | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

For years now, policymakers have sought an explanation for the mental health crisis among young people. The social psychologist Jonathan Haidt points to smartphones, and the algorithms that draw kids away from healthy play and into dangerous, addictive thought loops. The real problem is a grim social landscape of school shootings, poverty and global warming. A group of researchers in Britain now propose another, at least partial, explanation: We talk about mental disorders so much. This hypothesis is called “prevalence inflation.” It holds that our society has become so saturated with discussion of mental health that young people may interpret mild, transient suffering as symptoms of a medical disorder.

Persons: Jonathan Haidt Locations: Britain

☆ One Twin Was Hurt, the Other Was Not. Their Adult Mental Health Diverged.
▼ + stars: | 2024-03-06 | by ( Ellen Barry | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

Take Dennis and Douglas. In high school, they were so alike that friends told them apart by the cars they drove, they told researchers in a study of twins in Virginia. Most of their childhood experiences were shared — except that Dennis endured an attempted molestation when he was 13. At 18, Douglas married his high school girlfriend. Why do twins, who share so many genetic and environmental inputs, diverge as adults in their experience of mental illness?

Persons: Dennis, Douglas Organizations: University of Iceland, Karolinska Institutet Locations: Virginia, Sweden

☆ Hope for Suicide Prevention
▼ + stars: | 2024-02-21 | by ( Ellen Barry | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

For decades, friends and family members of people who had jumped pleaded for a barrier. And for decades, my colleague John Branch recently reported, officials found reasons — the cost, the aesthetics — not to build one. But something is changing in the United States, where the suicide rate has risen by about 35 percent over two decades, with deaths approaching 50,000 annually. The U.S. is a glaring exception among wealthy countries; globally, the suicide rate has been dropping steeply and steadily. Barriers are in the works on the William Howard Taft Bridge in Washington, D.C., the Penobscot Narrows Bridge in Maine and several Rhode Island bridges.

Persons: John Branch, William Howard Taft Organizations: Washington , D.C, Universities Locations: United States, U.S, Washington ,, Penobscot, Maine, Rhode, Texas, Florida

☆ The Man in Room 117
▼ + stars: | 2024-01-28 | by ( Ellen Barry | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

Alone with his mother for the first time in almost a year, Andrey Shevelyov had a question: Could he come home? The hotel room had a sour, rancid smell, and clothes lay mounded in a corner. Clean-shaven now, Andrey looked younger than his 31 years, like the gentle, artistic boy he had been before the psychosis took hold. Fearful of being evicted from their apartment, she and her husband, Sam, sought a no-contact order to keep Andrey away. Now they were together in Room 117 in a budget hotel overlooking the interstate.

Persons: Andrey Shevelyov, Andrey, “, ”, Olga Mintonye, Sam Locations: Vancouver

☆ Workplace Wellness Programs Have Little Benefit, Study Finds
▼ + stars: | 2024-01-15 | by ( Ellen Barry | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

Employee mental health services have become a billion-dollar industry. New hires, once they have found the restrooms and enrolled in 401(k) plans, are presented with a panoply of digital wellness solutions, mindfulness seminars, massage classes, resilience workshops, coaching sessions and sleep apps. These programs are a point of pride for forward-thinking human resource departments, evidence that employers care about their workers. Across the study’s large population, none of the other offerings — apps, coaching, relaxation classes, courses in time management or financial health — had any positive effect. Trainings on resilience and stress management actually appeared to have a negative effect.

Persons: — Organizations: Industrial Relations, Workers Locations: British

☆ Brain Study Suggests Traumatic Memories Are Processed as Present Experience
▼ + stars: | 2023-11-30 | by ( Ellen Barry | More About Ellen Barry | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

Decades of treatment of military veterans and sexual assault survivors have left little doubt that traumatic memories function differently from other memories. The team conducted brain scans of 28 people with PTSD while they listened to recorded narrations of their own memories. Some of the recorded memories were neutral, some were simply “sad,” and some were traumatic. The brain scans found clear differences, the researchers reported in a paper published on Thursday in the journal Nature Neuroscience. The people listening to the sad memories, which often involved the death of a family member, showed consistently high engagement of the hippocampus, part of the brain that organizes and contextualizes memories.

Organizations: Yale University, Icahn School of Medicine, Mount, Neuroscience

☆ Harvard Cozies Up to #MentalHealth TikTok
▼ + stars: | 2023-10-16 | by ( Ellen Barry | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

One day in February, an invitation from Harvard University arrived in the inbox of Rachel Havekost, a TikTok mental health influencer and part-time bartender in Seattle who likes to joke that her main qualification is 19 years of therapy. @ruggedcounseling, a therapist from Chattanooga, Tenn., who discusses attachment styles on his TikTok account, sometimes while loading bales of hay onto the bed of a pickup truck. Twenty-five recipients glanced over the emails, which invited them to collaborate with social scientists at the T.H. Chan School of Public Health at Harvard. They were not accustomed to being treated with respect by academia; several concluded that the letters were pranks or phishing attempts and deleted them.

Persons: Rachel Havekost, Trey Tucker, a.k.a, Bryce Spencer, Jones, Kate Speer Organizations: Harvard University, of Public Health, Harvard Locations: Seattle, Chattanooga, Tenn, Chan

☆ Peace Corps Sued Over Mental Health Policy
▼ + stars: | 2023-09-27 | by ( Ellen Barry | More About Ellen Barry | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

Lea Iodice was thrilled to hear that the Peace Corps had accepted her application and was sending her to Senegal as a community health care worker. She shared the good news with her roommates, her family and her favorite professor and daydreamed about her last day at her job, managing a gym called SnapFitness. She was crushed, about a month later, to receive a letter from the Peace Corps Office of Medical Services saying that her offer was being rescinded because she was in treatment for anxiety. “The reason for medical nonclearance is that you are currently diagnosed with an unspecified anxiety disorder,” read the letter, which appeared in her online application portal. For years, comparing notes under anonymous screen names, Peace Corps applicants have shared stories about being disqualified because of mental health history, including common disorders like depression and anxiety.

Persons: Lea Iodice, daydreamed, ”, Iodice Organizations: Peace Corps, Medical Services, Peace Locations: Senegal

☆ In ‘The Hungry Season,’ Whole Worlds in a Grain of Rice
▼ + stars: | 2023-09-26 | by ( Ellen Barry | More About Ellen Barry | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

To keep rice seedlings from shriveling in the arid San Joaquin Valley, a farmer must flood them two or three times a week with water pumped up from deep below the surface of the earth. Then she must wage war against strangling weeds, cut each stalk individually and thresh it by hand. If rice is so cheap and plentiful, why bother? Over the next 20 years, as Lisa M. Hamilton recounts in “The Hungry Season,” Ia’s 10 rows of seedlings grow into a kingdom of nine acres. Her farm will become a refuge for older Hmong women who whisper and sing to one another as they harvest rice stalks by hand, working their way up parallel rows of grain.

Persons: Lisa M, Hamilton, ” Organizations: Hamilton, U.S . State Department Locations: Fresno, Calif, Laos, Thai, California, shriveling, San Joaquin Valley

She was 10, on summer vacation. “Daddy’s plane crashed,” said one of her five siblings — she has never known which one. The information did not register; she thought they meant one of her father’s model airplanes. It was 1973, a time when adults didn’t talk to children about death. That afternoon, a neighbor took the children to the beach so they wouldn’t see news coverage of the crash, among the deadliest in New England’s history.

Persons: Michelle Brennen, ”, — Locations: Essex Junction, Vt

The same month, Elis for Rachael filed a class-action lawsuit accusing the university of discriminating against students with disabilities. Yale is not the only elite university to face legal challenges over its mental health policies. By offering part-time study as an accommodation, Yale has provided relief beyond what Stanford did, said Monica Porter Gilbert, an attorney at the Bazelon Center for Mental Health Law who represented plaintiffs in both cases. “It’s the students and the plaintiffs in this case making their voices heard and bringing Yale to the table to have difficult conversations,” she said. “As a nation, we talk about mental health differently now.”

Persons: ”, Pericles Lewis, Dean Lewis, Elis, Rachael, Brown, Monica Porter Gilbert, “ Organizations: Yale College, Yale, Washington Post, of Justice, Princeton, Stanford, Bazelon, Mental Health Law

☆ Mental Health Spending Surged During the Pandemic
▼ + stars: | 2023-08-25 | by ( Ellen Barry | More About Ellen Barry | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

Use of mental health care increased substantially during the coronavirus pandemic, as teletherapy lowered barriers to regular visits, according to a large study of insurance claims published Friday in JAMA Health Forum. From March 2020 to August 2022, mental health visits increased by 39 percent, and spending increased by 54 percent, the study found. Its examination of 1,554,895 claims for clinician visits also identified a tenfold increase in the use of telehealth. The study covers visits for around seven million adults throughout the country who receive health insurance through their employers, so it excludes many patients with very severe mental illnesses, and it does not cover acute or residential care. The increases are likely to be sustained, even as insurers weigh the benefit of continuing to pay more, said Christopher M. Whaley, a health care economist at the RAND Corporation and an author of the study.

Persons: Christopher M, Whaley Organizations: RAND Corporation

☆ A Novel Therapy, Using Writing, Shows Promise for PTSD
▼ + stars: | 2023-08-23 | by ( Ellen Barry | More About Ellen Barry | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +4 min

In 2018, a study by the same team found that written exposure therapy was as effective as cognitive processing therapy, another first-line, or most highly recommended, PTSD treatment. The first study of written exposure therapy as a treatment for PTSD appeared in 2012. Why It MattersCognitive processing therapy and prolonged exposure therapy, the two treatments most highly recommended by the Departments of Veterans Affairs and Defense, have been in widespread use since the 1980s and are backed up by abundant research. Written exposure therapy, Dr. Sloan said, seems to achieve similar effects in fewer sessions. Because most people can’t go to treatment for 12 to 16 sessions.”What’s NextData on the effectiveness of written exposure therapy is still emerging.

Persons: Denise Sloan, ”, Sloan, James Pennebaker, “, Barbara Rothbaum Organizations: Behavioral, National Center, of Veterans Affairs and Defense, Emory University Locations: Texas

☆ U.S. Watchdog Halts Studies at N.Y. Psychiatric Center After a Subject’s Suicide
▼ + stars: | 2023-08-10 | by ( Ellen Barry | More About Ellen Barry | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

Federal regulators have suspended research on human subjects at the Columbia-affiliated New York State Psychiatric Institute, one of the country’s oldest research centers, as they investigate safety protocols across the institute after the suicide of a research participant. The decision affected 417 studies, of which 198 have continuing participation. Of those, 124 receive federal funding. It is unusual for the U.S. regulatory office to suspend research, and this suggests that investigators are concerned that potential violations of safety protocols occurred more broadly within the institute. Almost 500 studies, with combined budgets totaling $86 million, are underway at the institute, according to its website.

Persons: Kate Migliaccio, “, Carla Cantor Organizations: Columbia, New, Psychiatric Institute, U.S . Department of Health, Human Services, Human

Heather Klein was in her cabin at Camp Nah-Jee-Wah, nursing her first iced tea of the morning, when a photograph arrived on her phone and she drew a deep, sudden breath. Ms. Klein, the mental-health coordinator for a network of sleep-away camps, has a morning routine: responding to queries from anxious parents, who have looked at the photographs posted online the night before. A teenage camper had switched from high-tops to Crocs to go to the beach, which allowed her counselor to see a row of cuts the girl had made with a razor. Ms. Klein pulled up the girl’s medical forms, which noted that she had been in therapy for anxiety and depression but made no mention of self-harm. “She’s going to have to go home.”

Persons: Heather Klein, Klein, “ She’s, ”

☆ Teenage Girls Were Behind a Surge in Mental Health Hospitalizations
▼ + stars: | 2023-07-12 | by ( Ellen Barry | More About Ellen Barry | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: 1 min

As the coronavirus pandemic dragged through its second year, an increasing number of American families were so desperate to get help for depressed or suicidal children that they brought them to emergency rooms. A large-scale analysis of private insurance claims shows that this surge in acute mental health crises was driven largely by a single group — girls aged 13 to 17. During the second year of the pandemic, there was a 22 percent increase in teenage girls who visited emergency rooms with a mental health emergency compared with a prepandemic baseline, with rises in patients with suicidal behavior and eating disorders, according to the study of 4.1 million patients published on Wednesday in JAMA Psychiatry. During the same period, March 2021 to March 2022, the records showed a 9 percent drop in teenage boys who made emergency room visits for mental health problems.

Organizations: Psychiatry

☆ How a Tech Star Lost His Way
▼ + stars: | 2023-04-25 | by ( Ellen Barry | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

WONDER BOY: Tony Hsieh, Zappos and the Myth of Happiness in Silicon Valley, by Angel Au-Yeung and David JeansA few chapters into “Wonder Boy,” Tony Hsieh sells his first company to Microsoft for $265 million. At 24, he is fabulously rich and one of the rising stars in the tech firmament. So he sits down to write a list of the happiest periods in his life. “Connecting with a friend and talking through the entire night until the sun rose made me happy,” he writes. Lying on the freezing ground on a filthy blanket, he suffered smoke inhalation that would kill him.

☆ ‘I Live in Hell’: The Psychic Wounds of Ukraine’s Soldiers
▼ + stars: | 2023-03-14 | by ( Photographs Antoine D Agata | Text Ellen Barry | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +15 min

The soldier’s ward is a quiet place, high-ceilinged, with chess boards and a Ping-Pong table; you could mistake it for a rest home, except that the door handles have been removed. Tap Click to read their stories Oleksandr, 21 Occupation: Soldier, former student “I finished school and joined the army in 2021. Now I’m mostly sad; I’m better off alone.” Yulia, 47 Occupation: Soldier; combat medic, independent forensic expert I’m a combat medic. Stanislav, 29 Occupation: Soldier, former cook “I didn’t plan to end up here. I adjust to each person in this way.” Serhii, 42 Occupation: Soldier, former employee at a shipping company On April 28 2022, I joined the air assault forces.

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