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The Utah House resurrected and then passed a bill allowing public employees with mental disabilities to receive the same disability benefits as those with physical impairments.

HB105 from Rep. Brian King, D-Salt Lake City, creates a three-year pilot program offering full disability benefits for public employees who cannot work because of a mental disability. Current Utah law cuts off benefits for a mental disability after two years, while benefits for a physical disability may be extended.

“Do we believe that mental disabilities are just as real as physical disabilities?” Rep. Steve Eliason, R-Sandy, asked his colleagues. “Unfortunately, the world discriminates in many ways against people with mental illness, and it’s a stigma we’re trying to change.”

Read more at SLTrib.com.

Teen girls across the United States are “engulfed in a growing wave of violence and trauma,” according to federal researchers who released data Monday showing increases in rape and sexual violence, as well as record levels of feeling sad or hopeless.

Nearly 1 in 3 high school girls reported in 2021 that they seriously considered suicide — up nearly 60 percent from a decade ago — according to new findings from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Almost 15 percent of teen girls said they were forced to have sex, an increase of 27 percent over two years and the first increase since the CDC began tracking it.

“If you think about every 10 teen girls that you know, at least one and possibly more has been raped, and that is the highest level we’ve ever seen,” said Kathleen Ethier, director of the CDC’s Division of Adolescent and School Health who said the rise of sexual violence almost certainly contributed to the glaring spike of depressive symptoms. “We are really alarmed,” she said.

Ethier said it’s important to determine who is perpetrating the violence, which the survey did not address, and how it can be stopped.

Almost 3 in 5 teenage girls reported feeling so persistently sad or hopeless almost every day for at least two weeks in a row during the previous year that they stopped regular activities — a figure that was double the share of boys and the highest in a decade, CDC data showed.

Girls fared worse on other measures, too, with higher rates of alcohol and drug use than boys and higher levels of being electronically bullied, according to the 89-page report. Thirteen percent had attempted suicide during the past year, compared with 7 percent of boys.

Richard Weissbourd, a psychologist and senior lecturer at Harvard’s Graduate School of Education, said there is probably not a single cause to explain the data but rather interacting causes that vary by race, ethnicity, class, culture and access to mental health resources.

Even so, he said, “girls are more likely to respond to pain in the world by internalizing conflict and stress and fear, and boys are more likely to translate those feelings into anger and aggression,” he said. Boys are more likely to “mask depression,” he said, while girls may be more vulnerable to social media and “a culture obsessed with attractiveness and body image.”

Read more at WashingtonPost.com.

Data continues to show that Latinos do not seek out therapy or other mental health support at the same rates as other racial or ethnic groups. An increasing number of Black, Asian and white Americans are seeking out mental health treatment while the rate of Latinos remains near stagnant, according to a recent analysis by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. This could be in part because of relatively low numbers of Latino mental health providers, a fact that could affect who seeks treatment as some patients want a provider who understands their cultural background. Stigma surrounding mental health conversations and services could be another factor. Little data, if any, is collected on those who seek support from spiritual healers.

Both healers and researchers say Latinos and other Southern Californians, who aren’t necessarily connected to the culture, often turn to curanderismo (traditional healing) when they’ve felt Western medicine didn’t meet their needs. It is difficult to definitively measure the medical benefits of spiritual healing, but these same experts point out that an integrative approach with doctors and healers working together in clinics arguably produces benefits beyond those easily documented in an X-ray or CT scan.

In the U.S., these healers aren’t typically found working alongside doctors and nurses in primary care practices, but that’s changing in small pockets of the U.S. and other parts of the world. It’s similar to the recent movement in California, Arizona and other states where Indigenous leaders are pushing for Medicaid reimbursement to cover traditional healing services that they see as beneficial to tribal members’ mental health.

Read more at SanDiegoUnionTribune.com.

More than 113,000 American Indians and Alaska Natives (AI/AN) live in 492 counties that lack mental health providers, according to a new report from GoodRx Research.

Over 90% of these areas are in rural parts of the U.S., where healthcare resources are already limited, the report stated.

“In fact, there are fewer than one psychiatrist or psychologist for every 30,000 people living in these counties,” said Amanda Nguyen, a health economist at GoodRx Research.

Nguyen said mental health access is lacking in the South Central, Midwest, and Alaska regions of the U.S.: These regions have the highest number of mental health care deserts, including Texas (30 mental health desert counties), Kansas (13), Oklahoma (8), Nebraska (8), and Alaska (7) have some of the highest numbers of mental health deserts. In addition to Alaska (11,171), South Dakota (14,650) has one of the highest numbers of AI/AN residents living in mental health deserts.

“It’s important to note our analysis focused on psychiatrists and psychologists, due to their ability to diagnose and prescribe medication for mental health disorders,” she added. “It did not take into consideration the important mental health care and support that therapists, social workers, primary care physicians, and traditional healers may also provide to these communities.”

The report also found that poor broadband access limits access to telehealth services, which could help with mental health resources.

Read more at DailyYonder.com.

The collective trauma of COVID-19 paired with heightened racial tension in the wake of the George Floyd protests has had a profound impact on Black students. Many counselors at Historically Black College and Universities (HBCUs) are noticing this effect in their students and the heavy toll that it is taking on their mental health.

“People are very much feeling disconnected from a lot of things. From classes, from their friends, from families. That could have a huge impact upon other areas of their lives,” said Vivian Barnette, counseling director at North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University.

Sometimes, however, it’s not as easy to detect what’s clearly a crisis in the community. In Baton Rouge, Louisiana, the number of students seeking counseling at Southern University and A&M College is just about the same as pre-pandemic, after opening back to in-person sessions. But counseling director ValaRay Irvin explains that many of her counselors are now seeing more students presenting with increased anxiety, depression and lack of motivation.

Rates of depression and anxiety among Black students have been increasing at a staggering rate. A study from the National Institutes of Health found that approximately 34% of Black students reported feeling “so depressed in the last year it was difficult to function.” Black students attending HBCUs have also been dealing with the additional stress of bomb threats at their universities, and suddenly not having access to abortion services in the wake of Roe v. Wade — Black women are disproportionately affected by this. Eighty-six HBCUs are in states that have already restricted access to abortion, and many more are in the process of challenging reproductive rights, a factor that undoubtedly adds to the stress and anxiety Black students are already experiencing.

Read more at HuffPost.com.

Organizations serving the homeless in North Texas increasingly provide mental health care services in addition to traditional aid like food and warming centers.

Dallas-based groups Our Calling and Austin Street Center both have multiple mental health care providers in their facilities every day.

Teresa Thomas, a spokesperson for Austin Street, said a lot of individuals that visit the center are struggling emotionally, albeit not necessarily dealing with a severe mental illness.

“Everyone at Austin Street Center is grieving the loss of something. So, the loss of a job, the loss of a home, the loss of a loved one,” Thomas said. “Then they are unfortunately just unable to cope.”

Both Thomas and Wayne Walker, CEO and Pastor of Our Calling in Dallas, emphasized that people experiencing homelessness go through a lot of traumas while living out on the streets. They say months and years of not feeling safe and not having a respite creates a fragile mental state.

“Many of them are abused or assaulted weekly and some of them even daily,” Walker said. “Those are traumas that people are dealing with in their lives that cause significant emotional, spiritual, physical, mental health crises that are far beyond what most people would think is the homeless experience.”

The staff at Our Calling is trained by mental health care providers to be better prepared for the scenarios they encounter.

The City of Denton, which recently opened a new community shelter, is also determined to address the mental health concerns of its homeless population.

Read more at KERANews.org.