General Mental Health Issues
- OpenAI wants ChatGPT to stop enabling its users’ unhealthy behaviors. The popular chatbot app will prompt users to take breaks from lengthy conversations. The tool will also soon shy away from giving direct advice about personal challenges, instead aiming to help users decide for themselves by asking questions or weighing pros and cons. Read more here.
- More than half of Americans are stressed about buying groceries — significantly more than the financial pressure they feel about credit card debt, childcare, or student debt, an AP-NORC poll found. Read more here.
- Nursing homes have long housed people with physical infirmities, but they have also become a home for hundreds of thousands of people with mental illnesses. In some nursing homes, upward of 90% of residents have a diagnosis of schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, or psychotic disorder. Read more here.
Youth Mental Health
- A new federal report finds that the percentage of adults with suicidal thoughts and attempts remained about the same between 2021 and 2024. However, the analysis of the National Survey on Drug Use and Health did offer some good news: Over that same time period, depression and suicidal thoughts and behaviors in teens declined. Read more here.
- Illinois will require school districts to offer universal mental health screenings for students after Gov. JB Pritzker signed SB 1560, making it the first state in the nation to do so, according to a news release. The law will give schools access to free screening tools and related technology to support annual screenings for students in grades 3-12, starting in the 2027-28 school year. Read more here.
- Governor JB Pritzker signed HB1806, the Wellness and Oversight for Psychological Resources (WOPR) Act, into law. Illinois becomes one of the first states to establish clear legal guardrails protecting mental health care from unregulated artificial intelligence (AI) systems posing as therapists. The name “WOPR” is a nod to the supercomputer from the 1983 movie WarGames, symbolizing the critical need to control powerful technology before it causes unintended harm. Read more here.
Climate Change and Mental Health
- The toll of wildfires is usually counted in acres burnt, property destroyed, and lives lost to smoke and flames. However, three studies published suggest the cost to human health from the Maui and Los Angeles wildfires was substantially higher. Jonathan Purtle of New York University was the lead author of another study, which calculated rates of suicide and overdose deaths in Maui and Hawaii’s four other counties. That research team found a 97% increase in suicides and overdose death rates on Maui during the month of the wildfires. Read more here.
The Opioid Crisis
- A group of public health leaders called on the CDC and its new director, Susan Monarez, PhD, to protect critical overdose prevention programs across the U.S. In a media briefing, the group, convened by the nonprofit Safe States Alliance, spoke out against a reported proposition to cut or freeze $140 million, about half of the $279 million in grants, to states, territories, and localities administered by the Overdose Data to Action (OD2A) program. Read more here.
- The United States won’t be able to solve the fentanyl crisis without help from its greatest rival. China is the world’s largest supplier of the chemicals that drug smugglers use to produce the opioid, and the country’s regulators have proved that they can stem its spread on the black market—when they’re so inclined. However, despite pressure from Washington, Chinese leaders have not done nearly as much as they could to crack down on the illicit-fentanyl trade. Read more here.
Transgender Issues
- Seventeen Democratic officials accused President Donald Trump’s administration of unlawfully intimidating health care providers into stopping gender-affirming care for transgender youth in a lawsuit. The complaint comes after a month in which at least eight major hospitals and hospital systems — all in states where the care is allowed under state law — announced they were stopping or restricting the care. The latest announcement came from UI Health in Chicago. Read more here.
- New Hampshire is the first Northeastern state to ban gender-affirming health care for minors after its Republican governor gave final approval to bills that will ban the use of certain prescription medications and surgeries to treat gender dysphoria beginning next year. Read more here.
Budget Bill Impacts on Medicaid and the ACA
- The importance of rural hospitals may become clearer when they begin to disappear. That’s the result rural health experts predict from the budget bill President Donald Trump signed into law on July 4. The downstream effects of cuts to Medicaid, on which a disproportionate amount of rural residents rely, are estimated to put 380 independent rural hospitals “at serious risk of closure nationwide,” according to Families USA, a non-partisan consumer health care nonprofit. Read more here.
- North Carolina’s first-in-the-nation Healthy Opportunities Pilot, which sought to address the nonmedical health needs of rural residents on Medicaid, faces a bleak future after state lawmakers failed to extend funding for the program in their stripped-down “mini budget” passed last month. Read more here.
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