Tuesday, November 09, 2004

Action Expected on FY 2005 Funding Bills for Mental Illness Research and Services
A NAMI legislative alert - "With the 2004 elections now behind them, Congress will return to Washington the week of November 15 for a "lame duck" session to complete action on spending legislation for the current fiscal year. Among the bills that Congress will be taking up are spending measures regarding mental illness research and services, housing and veterans programs. Congress hopes to complete these measures quickly given that FY 2005 began back on October 1 and agencies are still operating under an extension of last year’s budget."  
  

An Analysis of the Literature on Disease Management Programs
A report (in Adobe Acrobat format) from the Congressional Budget Office - "According to CBO’s analysis, there is insufficient evidence to conclude that disease management programs can generally reduce overall health spending. It is important to note that such programs could be worthwhile even if they did not reduce costs, but CBO’s analysis focused on the question of whether those programs could pay for themselves. The proposition that decreased use of acute care services might offset the costs of the screening, monitoring, and educational services in disease management programs is clearly appealing, but, unfortunately, much of the literature on those programs does not directly address health care costs. Instead, the focus is often on the processes of care or on intermediate measures of health, from which an overall impact on spending cannot reasonably be inferred. The few studies that report cost savings do so for controlled settings and generally fail to account for all health care costs, including the cost of the intervention itself. Furthermore, if disease management programs were applied to broader populations, the reported savings might not be attainable, and the programs could even raise costs. So while a few studies indicate that disease management programs could be designed to reduce overall health costs for select groups of patients (at least in the short term), little research directly addresses the issues that would arise in applying disease management to the older and sicker Medicare population."  
  

Mood, Anxiety Disorders Often Independent of Substance Abuse
Psychiatric News story - "Primary care and mental health clinicians who see patients with mood or anxiety disorders should be prepared to assess them for substance use disorders, suggest the results of a study of co-occurring disorders. About 20 percent of the 19.4 million American adults with a substance use disorder meet diagnostic criteria for at least one type of mood disorder, and about 18 percent of this group also meet criteria for an anxiety disorder. A significant proportion of those diagnosed with a mood or anxiety disorder also turn out to have a substance use disorder, according to data from the 2001-02 National Epidemiologic Survey on Alcohol and Related Conditions (NESARC), which was conducted by the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism (NIAAA)."  
  

Social anxiety disorder – beyond shyness
Story at The Daily - "Social anxiety disorder, aptly described as "crippling shyness," usually begins in childhood or early adolescence, and the symptoms often persist for decades, a new study shows. The study, based on data from the 2002 Canadian Community Health Survey (CCHS): Mental Health and Well-being, provides further evidence supporting the description of the disorder as an 'illness of lost opportunities.' People with social anxiety disorder, also known as social phobia, go through life feeling extremely uncomfortable or paralyzed in social or work situations because of their intense fear of being scrutinized or embarrassed. They either totally avoid social encounters, or face them with dread." See also the full report (Adobe Acrobat format).  
  

Counseling Can Prevent Depression Recurrence
Reuters Health story at Yahoo - "After being treated with standard medications, patients who undergo a type of counseling called cognitive behavior therapy have a much lower rate of relapse compared with those who receive standard follow-up care, new research shows. Cognitive behavior therapy or CBT involves learning to recognize distorted thoughts that lead to emotional distress. Instead of attacking the emotion, the patient is taught to address the distorted thought that lead to the emotion. By treating the thought, the emotion often improves..."  
  

HHS Awards $4 Million for Substance Abuse Prevention Grants for Young Workers
SAMHSA press release - "Health and Human Services Secretary Tommy G. Thompson today announced 13 grants totaling $4 million over two years to provide substance abuse prevention programs for youth ages 16-24 who are transitioning into the workplace. The awards are $150,000 or less per year for up to 2 years to adopt evidence-based interventions for youthful employees and their families. These programs will direct specific attention to gender, ethnic, cultural, linguistic and occupational variations in the workplace, targeting younger workers. Recipients of the awards will enhance existing prevention programs and collect survey data to determine their effectiveness."  
  

$6.6 Million Grant to Support Suicide Prevention Hotline
Item at PNN Online - "Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA) Administrator Charles Curie announced a $6.6 million grant to the Mental Health Association of New York City to manage a toll-free national suicide prevention hotline network of local crisis centers that can link callers to local emergency, mental health and social service resources. The Mental Health Association of New York will receive approximately $2.2 million per year for each of three years to provide information about and assistance in implementing suicide prevention programs. In addition, funds will also be used to increase the number of crisis centers certified in suicide prevention."  
  

Suit filed against Oregon's largest mental health agency
Story at the KATU-TV web site - "A federal advocacy group has filed a wrongful death lawsuit against Multnomah County and Cascadia Behavioral Healthcare Inc., contending that a woman died because mental health providers failed to hospitalize her after she was evicted from her group home because of disruptive behavior."  
  

Comparison of Statewide Emergency Mental Health Preparedness Plans
Temple University press release, based on a recently completed pilot study of state mental health emergency preparedness plans - "State mental health services agencies were unprepared for the fear, anxiety and uncertainty felt by many in the days after the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks. In response, a detailed mental health emergency preparedness plan for every state was created with funding from the Centers for Disease Control and other government entities. Researchers from Temple University’s department of public health recently completed a pilot study of these plans for New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Virginia. The team found that the communication strategies for dealing with mental health needs, mechanisms for communicating with diverse populations and the communication assumptions about the states’ population distributions differed for each state. Their work uncovered each state’s communications strengths as well as areas where more strategic planning is needed."  
  

Many Utahns to lose mental health services
Story in the Deseret News - "Nearly 10 percent of poor Utahns who receive government mental health services could lose them because of changes in the federal rule over how Medicaid dollars are spent. In the next six months, a projected 4,332 residents — 825 of them children — will not receive treatment at the 11 public mental health centers across the state, administrators say. At Central Utah Counseling, 300 people who have received services for years have already been turned away because the center can only afford to treat those who are eligible under the joint state/federal Medicaid insurance plan."  
  

When the battle is over, troops face a new foe — PTSD (Missouri)
News-Leader story, focused on the Springfield MO area on an "ongoing U.S. military effort to counsel troops before their combat stress grows into post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), a psychological problem that can lead to mental health problems, domestic violence, inability to work, hospitalizations and even suicide. Military officials admit that there was little preventive help for troops in earlier wars, and decades later some veterans still suffer the effects."