A rising hunger among children

From the Boston Globe: Doctors at a major Boston hospital report they are seeing more hungry and dangerously thin young children in the emergency room than at any time in more than a decade of surveying families. Read more...

Mental care can be hard to find

From the Boston Globe: Massachusetts patients with top-flight medical insurance may still find it difficult to get the mental health services they need, according to research from Harvard doctors released today that provides fresh evidence of a crisis in psychiatric care. Read more...

Fighting Poverty the American Way

From the Brookings Institute: President Lyndon Johnson declared war on poverty in the United States in 1964. At the time, the United States had a very modest commitment to programs, other than public education, aimed at the poor. Part of Johnson’s intent was to accompany his anti-poverty commitment with a host of programs that would help the poor. It is invigorating to read about the optimism with which his team worked to invent programs that might help the poor improve their well-being or even avoid poverty in the first place. In retrospect, it is clear that there were lots of ideas about how to help the poor, but few of the ideas had been tested. Then as now, it was mathematically certain that poverty could be reduced by simply giving families money, but Americans do not like giving money to able-bodied people who don’t work. Thus, anti-poverty policy in the United States has been in large part a struggle to provide the poor with enough cash and in-kind benefits to have a decent if spare standard of living while simultaneously trying to help them and especially their children achieve self-sufficiency and get a foot on the ladder to success. The goals of this paper are to discuss the causes of poverty in the United States, provide an overview of anti-poverty programs, review spending on the programs, and then examine evidence that the programs have had an impact on poverty. I also focus some attention on what we have learned about the programs that attempt to fight poverty by improving children’s development and by helping children and young adults avoid or overcome conditions that are associated with poverty. Download the full paper...

Thinking Globally to Improve Mental Health

From the National Institute of Mental Health:

NIH Announces International Research Initiative

Source: NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory (NASA-JPL)

Mental health experts are calling for a greater world focus on improving access to care and treatment for mental, neurological, and substance use (MNS) disorders, as well as increasing discoveries in research that will enable this goal to be met.

The Grand Challenges in Global Mental Health Initiative, led by the National Institutes of Health and the Global Alliance for Chronic Diseases, has identified the top 40 barriers to better mental health around the world. Similar to past grand challenges, which focused on infectious diseases and chronic, noncommunicable diseases, this initiative seeks to build a community of funders dedicated to supporting research that will significantly improve the lives of people living with MNS disorders within the next 10 years. Read more...