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By Columbia University, Photo: freestocks/Unsplash, Technology Networks Neuroscience News & Research, December 11, 2023 Racial discrimination and bias are painful realities and increasingly recognized as detrimental to the health of adults and children. These stressful experiences also appear to be transmitted from mother to child during pregnancy, altering the strength of infants’ brain circuits, according to a new study from researchers at Columbia, Yale, and Children’s Hospital of Los...

Elderly people sit on a bench in the Chinatown neighborhood of San Francisco, California. Photographer: David Paul Morris/Bloomberg By Sarah Holder, Bloomberg CityLab, December 7, 2023 In a brick rowhouse in Baltimore County live unlikely roommates, born half a century apart. Lena Wilson is 81 years old and has owned her three-bedroom home for over four decades. Her tenant is in his 20s; before moving in with Wilson, he was homeless. Since 2021, Wilson has welcomed young people for...

By Nina E. Cerfolio and Ira D. Glick,Photo: Unsplash, MDedge Psychiatry, December 5, 2023 Our psychiatric research, which found a high incidence of undiagnosed mental illness in mass shooters, was recently awarded the esteemed Psychodynamic Psychiatry Journal Prize for best paper published in the last 2 years (2022-2023). The editors noted our integrity in using quantitative data to argue against the common, careless assumption that mass shooters are not mentally ill. Some of the mass...

Patients in the study were examined using an fMRI machine such as this one. fMRI is a noninvasive way to measure and map activity in the brain. Getty Images By Laura Baisas, Popular Science, November 30, 2023 New research indicates that the traumatic memories of patients with post-traumatic stress disorder are represented very differently in the brain than “regular” sad autobiographical memories . A small study published November 30 in the journal Nature Neuroscience supports the idea that...

Mental Health Professionals are continuously working with individuals who have several traumatic events that may have occurred in their lives. A perfect example would be the disastrous event of Hurricane Katrina that occurred in New Orleans, Louisiana. There were several Mental Health Professionals who worked numerous amounts of hours to assist these individuals in healing post-Katrina. These Mental Health Professionals also began to encounter negative mental health problems from counseling...

By Dara Mathis, Photo Illustration: Alanna Fields; Photo: Spelman College Archives, The New York Times, November 11, 2023 On June 24, 1983, Byllye Avery welcomed busloads of Black women to the campus of Spelman College in Atlanta. She was in a state of disbelief. The women had traveled from Mississippi, New York, Pennsylvania — even as far away as California — for a three-day event billed as the First National Conference on Black Women’s Health Issues. She had hoped that 200 women would...

By Jillian McKoy, Photo: KATE_SEPT2004/iStock, The Brink, October 31, 2023 Charlene Coyne often thinks back to how her mother, Donna, struggled with severe hypertension for most of her life, battling complications that led to a heart attack and stroke by the time Donna was in her thirties. She also recalls the dismissive response from a doctor when her mother voiced concerns about the severe side effects—blurry vision, severe headaches, dizziness, nausea, fatigue—of her blood pressure...

By Isaiah Thompson, Photo: Shelly Shell/Unsplash, Nonprofit Quarterly, November 16, 2023 In a time when reproductive rights are under threat and being actively eroded in the United States—and when Black people simultaneously face a landscape of unequal and inequitable access to healthcare—what does an agenda centered around Black reproductive justice look like? A new report from In Our Own Voice , the 2023 National Black Reproductive Justice Policy Agenda , seeks to answer that question. The...

By Victoria Hughes-Barrow and Aaron Johnson, Photo: Paolese/stock.adobe.com, Pharmacy Times, November 9, 2023 The importance of mental health, although neglected in the past, has become much more prominent since the COVID-19 pandemic. Emotional, psychological, and social aspects that constitute well-being were impacted, bringing mental health to the forefront of conversations about health and wellness. Now more than ever, it is essential to consider the mental health of populations that were...

By Natasha Crooks, Illustration: from article, Ms., December 16, 2023 As of this fall, GOP leaders and lawmakers in over a dozen states, including Iowa, Arkansas, Indiana, Idaho, New Hampshire and Kentucky, have passed bans on teaching human sexuality or stymied federal grants aimed at addressing sexual behaviors and lowering rates of teen pregnancy and sexually transmitted infections (STIs). Six states—Alabama, Colorado, Florida, Idaho, Iowa and South Carolina—have discontinued their...

By Colleen DeGuzman, Photo: E+/Getty Images, California Healthline, December 5, 2023 Many people from racial and ethnic minority groups brace themselves for insults and judgments before medical appointments, according to a new survey of patients that reaffirms the prevalence of racial discrimination in the U.S. health system. The KFF survey of nearly 6,300 patients who have had care in the past three years found that about 55% of Black adults feel they have to be very careful about their...

Crystal Pérez Lira, founder of Bloodys Red Tijuana. Ana Ramirez for STAT By Olivia Goldhill, STAT, December 7, 2023 Just over a decade ago, when Crystal Pérez Lira needed an abortion, she had to leave Mexico. The procedure was illegal in her home state of Baja California and so deeply stigmatized that even Pérez Lira supported the procedure only for those who were raped. Until she unexpectedly got pregnant. She traveled to the U.S. for help, walking alone across the border from Tijuana to...