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The trauma associated with natural disasters, refugee flight, teenage bullying, or gun violence can endure for a lifetime if appropriate mental health services are not provided. Just as we don’t wait for a wound to become infected before providing treatment, so too we must act quickly to curb emotional damage before it festers. Models of mental health first aid training sh...
Over the past 20 years, almost 200,000 children under age 18 have been shot. Nearly as many attend schools where a shooting has taken place. Mass casualty events receive much of the attention — 60 percent of high school students say they are concerned that a shooting will occur in their school or community — but these actually represent just a fraction of the damage caused...
Our children are in crisis. Globally, one in seven children, ages 10-19, has some kind of mental illness, notably depression, anxiety, or behavioral disorders. Horrifically, almost 19% of US high school students have given serious thought to suicide and an astonishing 9% have actually tried to kill themselves. To turn back that kind of despair, we need to listen to young p...
As the nation’s top doctor, US Surgeon General Vivek Murthy helps to advance the health and well-being of all Americans. He has described the growing youth mental health crisis in America as the “defining public health crisis of our time” and warned that social media carries a “profound risk of harm to the mental health of children and adolescents.” Murthy has also highlig...
The Aspen Challenge presents three high school teams from Louisville and one team from Dallas who developed innovative solutions to issues that have chronically impacted their communities. See these young change-makers take to the stage to prove that entrepreneurial community solutions can be created at any age. Learn how Justin F. Kimball and Central High School Magnet Ca...
More than 14 million Americans live with a serious mental illness, such as schizophrenia or bipolar disorder, yet the availability of urgently needed treatment is completely inadequate. In Healing: Our Path from Mental Illness to Mental Health, author Thomas Insel offers a pathway towards wellness built around what he calls the three Ps—people, place, and purpose. A psychi...
Today’s kids are facing a mental health crisis unlike any before them, with rates of severe loneliness, anxiety, and depressive episodes reaching new heights. It’s an urgent concern with far-reaching impacts, especially for those in historically marginalized communities who too often do not have access to the help they need. How can organizations leverage their scale to ma...
Mental health disorders are rampant in America’s correctional facilities — in many cases, our prisons and jails are the main providers of mental health treatment in their municipalities. Furthermore, prisons and jails routinely subject people with mental illness to environments that radically exacerbate their condition, often to the point of suicide or self-harm. Why do so...
The lane for healthcare is widening. Well-capitalized retail and technology companies are pushing services out of the clinic and into big-box stores, corner shops, and private homes. While they are out purchasing computers and clothing, shoppers can also schedule their check-ups, dental care, mental health counseling, and X-rays. Meanwhile, tech companies are reaching clie...
In his new book, Deep Medicine, Eric Topol – cardiologist, geneticist, digital medicine researcher – claims that artificial intelligence can put the humanity back into medicine. By freeing physicians from rote tasks, such as taking notes and performing medical scans, AI creates space for the real healing that occurs between a doctor who listens and a patient who needs to b...
The rise of radicalization and violent extremism is a worldwide threat that seems to defy military solutions and cannot be countered only by the vigilance of law enforcement. A body of scholarship and experience suggests that the tools of public health may have an underutilized role to play in confronting terrorism by helping to identify at-risk individuals, building resil...
There’s a mental health crisis plaguing America’s youth. The last decade saw major increases in adolescents who reported having a depressive episode, and “serious loneliness” affected a majority of young adults—and the global pandemic has likely worsened these conditions. The stats are staggering, but we need to do more than just talk about them, and come together as paren...
As the nation’s top doctor, the US surgeon general is uniquely positioned to use his bully pulpit to drive Americans toward healthy decision-making. Jerome Adams is the 20th person to serve in that capacity, where he promotes wellness strategies, warns the public against emerging health hazards, and is a leader of the 6,500-person Public Health Service Commissioned Corps,...
Earlier this year, two gifted NBA stars, Kevin Love of the Cleveland Cavaliers and DeMar DeRozan of the San Antonio Spurs, each publicly discussed their challenges with mental and emotional well-being. Their honesty started a national conversation about breaking through the stigma and fear of openly discussing mental health issues in professional sports. In this very perso...
The crisis of loneliness poses as grave a threat to public health as obesity or substance abuse. It cuts across generations and reaches around the world. Katie Hafner calls it “a quiet devastation” and the poet Emily Dickenson writes that it is “the horror not to be surveyed.” Millions of people live with sparse human contact and research tells us that lonely people are mo...
Mental-health and substance-use disorders — arguably more prevalent than ever during the pandemic — are a leading cause of disability globally. So it’s no wonder the clinical use of psychedelic drugs to help treat psychiatric disorders, including anxiety, depression, and PTSD, is fueling a research renaissance. Even Wall Street is taking notice: Three psychedelic drug dev...
A giant in global public health who dedicated his life to championing equity, Paul Farmer’s death in Rwanda this year at the age of 62 is a heartbreaking loss. Passionate, blunt, and inspirational, he was a physician, an activist, an anthropologist, a mentor, a father, and a husband who rooted his work on the unshakeable principle that all people should be valued equally....
Anyone who has ever had a pet understands how deeply connected human beings are to the animals who serve as our companions, lessen our stress, and perhaps offer a buffer against cognitive decline. Puppy play date, anyone? Honeybees help to protect our food supply, vision-impaired people rely not only on seeing-eye dogs but also on seeing-eye horses, and animal research has...
Breakthrough research has revealed that the brain is especially open to change during specific periods in life – notably infancy and childhood, adolescence, and the transition to parenthood. During these sensitive times, interpersonal relationships play a central role in supporting healthy brain adaptation. What other key inputs help to grow and maintain a healthy brain, b...