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Of the 16 million American adults who live with depression, as many as one-quarter gain little or no benefit from available treatments, whether drugs or talk therapy. They represent perhaps the greatest unmet need in psychiatry. On Tuesday, the Food and Drug Administration approved a prescription treatment intended to help them, a fast-acting drug derived from an old and widely used anesthetic, ketamine.
More firefighters took their own lives than died on the job over that span, though line-of-duty deaths often eclipse suicides in the media and public consciousness.
A small but dedicated group of people in California and across the country is working to change that.
In the last few years these advocates have sought to increase awareness about firefighters' mental health, pushed departments to offer more firefighter-appropriate help and stepped in as counselors themselves.
In particular, ACS-CAN and the other patient advocacy groups are concerned about changes to Medicare's "protected classes," which include drugs that treat AIDS, cancer, some mental illnesses, and seizure disorders like epilepsy. They also include drugs for patients who received transplants.
Under current rules, Medicare Part D plans must cover nearly every drug for these conditions, with some exceptions. That's different than the rules for other diseases, where Medicare plans only need to cover two drugs per condition.
The Board of Supervisors approved a motion by Supervisors Kathryn Barger and Janice Hahn to create a countywide plan for the provision of school-based mental health services through the Department of Mental Health.
The National Alliance on Mental Illness has asked U.S. District Judge Nicholas Garaufis to make "adjustments and modifications" to an ambitious plan to move mentally ill New Yorkers from troubled group homes into their own apartments, in a letter citing an investigation by ProPublica and Frontline.
If a killer roaming America left 47,000 men, women and children dead each year, you can bet society would be demanding something be done to end the scourge.
Well, such a killer exists. It's called suicide, and the rate of it has steadily risen.
Yet the national response has been little more than a shrug, apart from raised awareness whenever celebrities — fashion designer Kate Spade and renowned chef Anthony Bourdain, to name two this year — are tragically found dead by their own hand.
Life expectancy in the United States declined from 2016 to 2017, yet the 10 leading causes of death remained the same, according to three government reports released Thursday. Increasing deaths due to drug overdoses and suicides explain this slight downtick in life expectancy, the US Centers for Disease Control says.
Suicide is a human tragedy and a major public health concern, and the National Institutes of Health is deeply committed to bringing the very best science to this critical issue. NIH expenditures on research related to suicide are far more extensive than the USA TODAY analysis implies.
Fighting fires has been compared to the military in another way — the stress that soldiers go through. In fact, a report by the International Association of Firefighters found that firefighters experience PTSD at rates similar to what's seen in combat veterans. The Ruderman Family Foundation has identified another startling trend: Last year, more firefighters died by suicide than in the line of duty.
So fire officials are trying new ways to alleviate the stress of overworked firefighters and change the culture.
"Mental health care continues to be severely underfunded," said Jon Lehrmann, chair of psychiatry and behavioral medicine at the Medical College of Wisconsin.