In the News

Cristina Rivell has been struggling with an opioid addiction since she was a teenager — going in and out of rehab for five years. The most recent time, her doctor prescribed her a low dose of buprenorphine (often known by its brand name, Suboxone), a drug that helps curb cravings for stronger opioids and prevents the symptoms of withdrawal.

Transgender adolescents are far more likely to attempt suicide than teens whose identity matches what it says on their birth certificates, and trans male youth are especially at risk, a U.S. study suggests.

Roughly half of transgender teens who identify as male but were assigned a female gender at birth have attempted suicide at least once, the study found. And 42 percent of adolescents who don't identify exclusively as male or female have at least one prior suicide attempt.

Who serves and protects those who serve and protect? That question is being raised again after the third Chicago police officer in three months died Wednesday by suicide.

The latest officer, a 54 year old veteran of CPD, was found unresponsive in the Calumet District parking lot at 727 E 111th St. about 8 a.m. She was inside her personal car and is thought to have died from a self-inflicted gunshot wound before her shift began.

Kids with ADHD are easily distracted. Barn owls are not.

So a team at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore is studying these highly focused predatory birds in an effort to understand the brain circuits that control attention.

The team's long-term goal is to figure out what goes wrong in the brains of people with attention problems, including attention deficit hyperactivity disorder.

For college-bound students and their families, the start of the school year can be a time of excitement and optimism, but a new study brings to light that the college years are also a time of increased risk of stressful events and a wide range of accompanying mental health challenges, including risk of suicide.

To the medical students, the patient was a conundrum.

According to his chart, he had residual pain from a leg injury sustained while working on a train track. Now he wanted an opioid stronger than the Percocet he'd been prescribed. So why did his urine test positive for two other drugs — cocaine and hydromorphone, a powerful opioid that doctors had not ordered? It was up to Clark Yin, 29, to figure out what was really going on with Chris McQ, 58 — as seven other third-year medical students and two instructors watched.

Can mood be decoded from brain data?

The work is part of a larger movement aimed at developing better, more personalized therapies for psychiatric conditions like depression, anxiety, post-traumatic stress disorder and obsessive compulsive disorder using deep brain stimulation, a procedure that requires surgery and is highly invasive. The approach is similar to treatments already in use for movement disorders like Parkinson's disease and epilepsy.

Like much of the rest of the nation, California went only halfway toward keeping its promise to improve mental health care. It closed psychiatric hospitals, some of which were really just costly warehouses for the sick rather than modern medical facilities offering effective treatment. But the state didn't follow through on its commitment to provide better alternatives, like community-based clinics that deliver the treatment and services needed to integrate patients into society, working and living independently where possible.