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Let’s Celebrate Our Workforce
Every day when he left home to serve as the attending psychiatrist at an inpatient unit at a general hospital, he wondered whether he would contract COVID at work that day and bring it home to his wife and two small children. Maybe he had already brought it home. Had stripping in the garage and...
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Becoming an Adult During the Pandemic: Trauma and Resilience
Studies tracking psychological distress during the pandemic show that young adults are more likely to be struggling emotionally than are older adults. No wonder. Their lives have been disrupted just at a time in life when they are making the transition from the common turmoil of adolescence to the...
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Mental Health Advocacy With and Without Advanced Technology
I just switched from E-mail to Microsoft Word to write this article about mental health and technology. I left 250 E-mails unanswered to make the move. Oy vey! I feel like I’m guilty of E-mail neglect. Who will I offend today by not responding to them? It wasn’t always like this. 45...
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Social Determinants of Behavioral Health: Time to Augment Advocacy Strategy?
The hope implicit in the concept of social determinants is that broad changes in the social, economic, and political structures of our communities, nations, and world can result in improved behavioral health of large populations, such as regions, age-groups, social classes, genders, disabilities,...
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Psychological Fallout of the Pandemic: What We Know, What We Don’t
More and more studies confirm widespread psychological fallout from the pandemic. The studies also confirm intuitive expectations about which populations are most psychologically vulnerable—those directly experiencing illness and death, those with economic hardship, frontline health care and...
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In the Shadow of the Pandemic: The Suicide Crisis in America
The pandemic, overdue confrontations of racism, and fears about the outcome of the 2020 election have diminished America’s alarm about rising drug overdose and suicide rates. But these epidemics continue, albeit in the shadow of COVID-19. This fall 2020 issue of Behavioral Health News is...
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Behavioral Health During and After the Pandemic
The response of the behavioral health system to the COVID pandemic has been rapid and remarkable. But it is, of course, imperfect and incomplete. What are the challenges still to be met? And what will happen after the pandemic, hopefully, ends and we move on to a new normal? What Has Been Done...
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Pain and Its Impact on the Opioid Epidemic
In several past articles on the opioid epidemic in America, I have complained that the problem of severe, chronic pain has been overlooked as a contributing factor. It appears that that is no longer true. For example, a very recent report by the National Academies of Science to the Food and Drug...
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Deinstitutionalization Did Not Cause Homelessness: Loss of Low-income Housing and Disability Benefits Did
I recently read yet another article that blames homelessness on deinstitutionalization. Yes, a disproportionate number of homeless people have long-term mental disorders, and yes some—perhaps a third—of these people would have been in state hospitals 65 or 70 years ago when that was pretty much...
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Addressing the Psychological Fallout of The Coronavirus Pandemic
The coronavirus pandemic in the United States has led to great efforts to prevent the spread of the virus and to prevent fatalities. But the problems that people will face due to the pandemic will go beyond medical issues. In addition, it will be important to address a variety of psychosocial...
