News

In response to the urgent need for resources to address the youth mental health crisis in our local communities, Hawai‘i Medical Service Association is investing $125,000 to support five unique programs across the state.

The KIDS COUNT 2022 Hawaiʻi profile found that the COVID-19 pandemic had a significant effect on Hawaiʻi’s young people. Nearly 2,200 more youth struggled with anxiety or depression in 2020 than in 2016, an increase of 23%.

“Our teenage population is struggling due to limited access to mental health resources, and we need to work together to support overall health conditions,” said Hawaiʻi Medical Service Association President and CEO Mark M. Mugiishi, M.D., F.A.C.S.

According to Hawaiʻi Health Matters, the most recent data on Hawaiʻi teens who attempted suicide in 2019 show that 3.2% of public high school students reported at least one suicide attempt that required medical attention, compared to 2.5% nationally.

The numbers are even more staggering for Native Hawaiians or when broken down by county. Investments by the Hawaiʻi Medical Service Association will support partner organizations and their work to address root causes of these disparities while providing innovative crisis support.

Mental Health America of Hawaiʻi, an organization that seeks to promote mental health and wellness through education, advocacy, service and access to care statewide, is one of the beneficiaries of this initiative. The funding will help the organization expand the reach of its statewide Youth Suicide and Bullying Prevention program with special emphasis placed on reaching youth and youth-serving adults in rural and isolated parts of the state. Since 2008, that prevention program has trained nearly 30,000 Hawaiʻi youth and youth-serving adults and has evolved to include components like Suicide Prevention 101 and Youth Mental Health First Aid certifications for adults.

“We project that we will reach an additional 2,000 youth and 1,000 youth-serving adults over the course of a year as a direct result of HMSA’s support,” said Bryan Talisayan, executive director of Mental Health America of Hawaiʻi.

Read more at MauiNow.com.

The most expensive disease in the United States is not what you think it may be: cancer. It is Alzheimer’s Disease, a progressive neurodegenerative disease that tends to affect people who are older in age. Most people know someone who has had Alzheimer’s, whether it be a family member or a friend of a family member. Some people are caregivers to someone with Alzheimers, and some people with ADRD live in a nursing home. People often don’t know what resources are available to people with Alzheimers when they are having a mental health crisis. This summer, I interned for the Alzheimer’s Association of Houston and Southeast chapter to research the public policy in this area to figure out how to improve it. Public policy is a wide variety of different laws and regulations that affect society. In my work, I focused on researching the intersection of mental health and Alzheimer’s in public policy. My goal was to help the Association create a protocol for when people with Alzheimer’s are having a mental health crisis.

My boss recognized a gap in Alzheimer’s resources allocated to Alzheimers within nursing homes, assisted living places, and government policy. There were not a lot of existing resources for people with Alzheimer/Dementia Related Disorders (ADRD) who had experienced a mental health crisis. The idea that mental health professionals should have trained police (or sometimes a different unit within the police department) to receive mental health calls, is a relatively new one. Out of Texas’ major cities, the oldest police department’s crisis intervention team is only a little over two decades old.

This is a problem when loved ones of people with ADRD call the police on them for having a mental health episode, whether it be threatening violence to their caregiver, having suicidal ideation, or having symptoms after refusing their psychiatric medication. Police departments’ crisis intervention teams don’t always know what to do. These people may be threatening violence to their caregivers, experiencing suicidal ideation, or refusing to take psychiatric drugs prescribed to help them. Most of the time these people are not actively suicidal or homicidal, so sending them to a psychiatric hospital, or putting them in jail would be inappropriate. Police taking them to a psychiatric hospital would be inappropriate, as the most of the time these people with ADRD having suicidal nor homicidal ideation, but being put in jail is not an appropriate solution either. This is a problem because sending patients back to the nursing home or to their home with their caregiver often doesn’t address the issue. So what do they do? That’s what I set out to research.

Read more at Megaphone.Southwestern.edu.

Quiet quitting is becoming more popular among U.S. workers, due in part to pandemic-related burnout. Now, new data show college students are hopping on the trend as one-third of these individuals report putting less effort into schoolwork in an effort to preserve their mental health.

Quiet quitting refers to employees not going above and beyond in the workplace, and only doing exactly what their job description requires, according to Gallup. In the school setting, the definition refers to students only doing what’s required in courses and not putting in their full or extra effort.

An Intelligent.com survey conducted among 1,000 community, public, and private college students revealed more than one-third put only some or little effort into their schoolwork while one in five reported their school-life balance is unhealthy.

In addition, 60 percent of respondents agreed with the statement “C’s get degrees,” meaning students don’t need to go above and beyond in the classroom in order to graduate.

The majority of these individuals said they do so in an effort to preserve their mental and physical health. Other reasons provided included procrastination, not having enough time and being too comfortable with low expectations.

Students tended to rank their mental health as a priority over school work, while 21 percent reported feeling “stressful” about their classes this semester. Good grades, physical health, relationships, and finances all ranked below mental health in importance.

Read more at TheHill.com.

Hospital programs like Healing Hurt People in Philadelphia and Chicago’s Shirley Ryan AbilityLab are dedicated to providing psychological aftercare to victims of gun violence.

It is an area that psychologists say gets too little emphasis, considering the high number of gunshot-wound survivors. For every gun-related homicide, there are more than two nonfatal gun shootings, according to the Educational Fund to Stop Gun Violence. It also says that 9 in 10 survivors of gun violence experienced trauma from being shot. Additionally, the data shows that residents of the poorest neighborhoods are 6.9 times more likely to be victims of gun violence than those in better-off areas.

That trauma manifests itself in post-traumatic stress symptoms, including insomnia, depression, nightmares or flashbacks, alcohol or substance abuse, and an inability to concentrate, among others.

In March 2020, Devon Gipson was shot five times in a drive-by shooting two houses down from his grandmother’s home in South Los Angeles. The mother of his daughter was shot in the leg, and a friend was killed.

Gipson, who works stocking supplies at a contractor warehouse, considers it a miracle that he survived the gunshot wounds to his shoulder, back, arm and body. As he recovered, Gipson learned that healing physically was only a small part of the process.

If Gipson had been shot in Philadelphia and gone to Drexel University Hospital, counselors from Healing Hurt People, a free intervention program that operates during emergency room hours between 9 p.m. to 2 a.m., would have been able to address his physical needs. The program identifies and addresses a victim’s trauma through interviews, said Dr. John Rich.

“We want to change the conversation . . . toward healing and strength,” Rich said.

Read more at NBCNews.com.

The shortage of Native American mental health clinicians is both a professional and a personal issue for Mary Owen.

“I’ve struggled with depression myself since high school,” said Owen, a Native American physician in Duluth and associate dean of Native health at the University of Minnesota Medical School.

Owen, a member of the Tlingit Nation, grew up in Juneau, Alaska, where “Natives were at the bottom of the pecking order,” she recalled, and the racism she frequently faced made her feel like a second-class citizen. She’s devoted much of her professional career to increasing the number of Native American healthcare professionals of all kinds. Owen said she’s always struggled to find Native therapists — for her own patients in Duluth, and for herself.

While exact numbers are hard to come by, there are likely only 200 to 300 Native American psychologists in the entire country, out of a population of several million people.

“American Indians are the most underserved and underrepresented when it comes to psychologists to potential population ratio,” said Doug McDonald, professor of clinical psychology at the University of North Dakota, and a member of the Oglala Lakota and Northern Cheyenne tribes.

At the same time, there’s a significant need for mental health services in Native communities. According to government estimates, nearly 20 percent of Native American adults have experienced mental illness. The suicide rate for Native teens is more than twice that of white youth. Native people experience serious psychological distress at more than double the rate of the general population.

Read more at MPRNews.org.

Racial mental health disparities cost the United States around $278 billion between 2016 and 2020, putting a price tag on a health equity issue that’s long plagued the nation, according to researchers from the Satcher Health Leadership Institute at Morehouse School of Medicine with support from Otsuka America Pharmaceutical, Inc.

The researchers looked at the national prevalence of mental health needs, care utilization, additional healthcare costs attributable to mental health disparities, and premature death across indigenous and racial or ethnic minorities. The analysis showed that, between 2016 and 2020, the US saw an excess of 117,000 premature deaths among indigenous and racial or ethnic minorities due to mental health needs.

All said, the excess cost due to these mental health disparities was $278 billion. That additional cost burden links back to mental illness, substance use disorder (SUD), and suicide, the researchers said.

These findings indicate that the healthcare industry needs to make more judicious investments in mental and behavioral healthcare, according to Daniel E. Dawes, JD, DHL (Hon).

“Investing in mental healthcare saves lives and dollars — we have known this for decades, but until now did not fully understand the monumental impacts of neglecting to act,” Dawes, a professor and the executive director of the Satcher Health Leadership Institute and author of the Political Determinants of Health, said in a statement.

Read more at PatientEngagementHIT.com