When it comes to our young people and their mental health, the news is not good. Suicide is the second-leading cause of death for people under 24 in the U.S., and a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention report last year found 20 percent of the country’s 12- to 17-year-olds had had at least one major depressive episode—results unlike anything the CDC had seen in thirty years of collecting such data. Its director of adolescent and school health, Kathlee Ethie, called the findings “devastating.” She said, “Young people are telling us they are in crisis. The data really call on us to act.” Th ..read more

This article was originally published by CalMatters, a nonprofit news outlet covering California policy and politics. Assemblymember Marie Waldron is a Republican from San Diego who was the GOP caucus leader for three years, at a time when California’s Democrats were waging a legislative war with Donald Trump. San Francisco Sen. Scott Wiener is a Democratic rising star who’s considered a leading candidate to replace one of the right’s biggest villains, U.S. Rep. Nancy Pelosi, should the former House speaker retire from Congress. The pair may not seem to have much in common ..read more

The Lake Nona Impact Forum mixed celebrities and C-suiters in discussion about the future of health. Bestselling author John Grisham spoke on a panel about focused ultrasound surgery. Designer Kenneth Cole was part of a discussion on how to curtail social media addiction. The conference brimmed with audacious ambition—one speaker’s goal was to end human disease within 100 years. Another speaker expected at least some of the well-heeled and well-educated attendees to be around to celebrate that landmark, thanks to yet-to-be invented technologies. “Life is short, until you extend it,” said X Pri ..read more

This article was originally published by Public Health Watch, a nonprofit investigative news organization. Find out more at publichealthwatch.org. When we hear about the global plastics crisis, many of us think, understandably, of seabirds entangled in six-pack rings and beached whales whose bellies are filled with marine debris. Awful images. But what about the effects on humans? They’re bad, it turns out—just not as visible. In an editorial published March 7 in the New England Journal of Medicine, Dr. Philip Landrigan, director of the Program for Global Public Health and the Common Good ..read more

This article is part of Public Health in Action, a new series from Harvard Public Health and The Studio that examines mental health programs across the U.S. that produce results. When I first learned about the EMPOWER program, it felt like a great opportunity. I’m a graduate student studying social work and a clinical research coordinator at Baylor Scott and White, an EMPOWER partner. I had already been working with the program to help bring more Spanish speakers into its training; I was excited to learn for myself a new model for care delivery, in a program that is helping expand an existing ..read more

In a hospital somewhere right now, a nurse is examining a sexual assault survivor’s body in order to collect evidence. The nurse stuffs Q-tip-like swabs into envelopes, fills out many paper forms, and packs all of that into a cardboard box. Then the box, called a rape kit, will go to a shelf in a dank basement. It could be years before someone opens that box and tests the DNA inside it. And maybe the box will never be opened at all. The rape kit is caught in a time warp. Even while other forensic tools have leapt into the digital age, it remains stuck in the 1970s. This is no knock on Mar ..read more

Sen. Chris Murphy sees loneliness as one of the few things in U.S. politics that crosses party lines. The Democrat from Connecticut says the issue matters to him for a number of reasons, not least because he is the father of a teen and a tween. He believes the federal government can take meaningful action to counter loneliness and reknit the social fabric. In a recent appearance at the Studio at Harvard Chan, he said that loneliness is a way to discuss social determinants of health without using that clunky phase, which he called “a perfect way to end a conversation with regular people.” Murph ..read more

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Many people have compared the addictive nature of social media to cigarettes. Checking your likes, they say, is the new smoke break. Others say the unease over social media is just the next round of moral panic about new technologies. We are a pair of researchers who investigate how social media affects the mental health of young people. More than 75 percent of teens check their phone hourly, and half say they feel like they’re addicted to their devices. Here are some of the things they’ve told us: “TikTok ..read more

This story was originally published by MLK50: Justice Through Journalism as the first in a series on lead poisoning. Read the other stories here and here, and subscribe to MLK50’s newsletter here. After Denedra Levy and her family moved to South Memphis, Tennessee in 2022, her two-year-old daughter and four-year-old son kept getting sick—vomiting, loss of appetite and headaches. One October morning, she and the two children took the bus to their pediatrician’s office. There, the doctor decided to test the kids’ blood lead levels. Levy thought little of it; they’d been tested before a ..read more

In just the last year, more than 140,000 people fleeing political instability, violence, crime, and unrest have arrived in New York City. Many of them grapple with dark trauma and anxiety, which clouds their thoughts. For help, they must navigate a system that is unprepared to tackle the looming mental health crisis of immigrants and asylum seekers. This community has long been neglected by our mental health system. About one in three asylum seekers and refugees experience high rates of depression, anxiety, and post-traumatic stress disorder. Yet only three percent are referred to mental ..read more