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'Scandal’ Keeps Missing Opportunities to Address Olivia Pope’s Mental Health

Stacia L. Brown Washington Post
According to data from the Center for Disease Control, black women have long faced high rates of depression and low rates of treatment. “Scandal” has been so groundbreaking in many ways; it’s curious that it hasn’t seized a really ripe, low-hanging opportunity to be more progressive in its depiction of black women’s struggles to safeguard their mental health.

labor

When Workers Fight: NUHW Wins Battle with Kaiser

Cal Winslow Beyond Chron
The victory of the therapists, counselors, and social workers at Kaiser Permanente in California is a landmark, in healthcare and above all in mental healthcare. The bottom line: these workers have won patient care ratios, they’ve won the right to advocate for patients, and they won these in a context of a nationwide drive to cut costs and press productivity in an industry awash in cash.

John Oliver: Mental Health

John Oliver explains how our national system of treating mental health works, or more often than not, how it doesn’t.

Much-touted Deep-Brain-Stimulation Treatment for Depression Fails Another Trial

John Horgan Scientific American
A highly invasive procedure, which involves drilling holes in the skull and inserting electrodes deep inside the brain allowing a pacemaker-style device to deliver pulses of electricity to specific neural regions has failed to show any effectiveness in treating depression despite claims by the media and some prominent scientists.

Russell Foster: Why Do We Sleep?

Russell Foster studies the sleep cycles of the brain. What do we know about sleep? Not a lot, it turns out, for something we do one-third of our lives. Foster shares popular theories about sleep, busts some myths and hints at some bold new uses of sleep.

Why Does Mississippi Want to Execute Michelle Byrom?

Andrew Cohen The Atlantic
Mississippi wants to execute a 56-year-old mentally ill woman Thursday even though no one now seems to believe that she murdered the husband who had battered and abused her for years. Mississippi wants its pound of flesh. But why from Michelle Byrom?

What Obama’s Gun Plan Means For Mental Health Care

Seth Freed Wessler ColorLines
The consequences for the mentally ill of the gun control push are not yet fully clear, as the full content of the president’s executive actions have yet to be released. And advocates will watch closely as congressional deliberations unfold over the vast parts of gun control that the president can’t do alone. But for now, it appears things are moving forward with some distance between proactive plans to improve mental health care and those to prevent mass murder.
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