Celebrity hotel heiress Paris Hilton is expanding her campaign for more public reporting on residential therapeutic centers’ use of restraints and seclusion rooms in disciplining teens, setting her sights on legislation in Sacramento and Washington, D.C.
For more than 20 years, children in Arkansas have been measured in school as part of a statewide effort to reduce childhood obesity. But the letters have had no impact on weight loss — and obesity rates have risen. Still, the practice of sending letters has spread to other states.
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The surge in overdose deaths among teens is opening a new path to treatment: pediatricians. A doctor in Massachusetts shows how it works with a 17-year-old patient.
State institutions and community hospitals have closed inpatient mental health units, often citing staffing and financial challenges. Now, for-profit companies are opening psychiatric hospitals to fill the void.
A California law that takes effect this summer will grant minors on public insurance the ability to get mental health treatment without their parents’ consent, a privilege that their peers with private insurance have had for years. But the law has become a flashpoint in the state’s culture wars.
Peer leaders can help ease the shortage of mental health providers and build trust through shared experiences, state health officials say. In 2022, California started allowing counties to use Medicaid dollars to pay them for their work.
California has commissioned an exhaustive study of whether its prisons provide a constitutional level of mental health care, which it could use to try to end one of the lawsuits that have federal courts overseeing the state’s prisons. But corrections officials won’t disclose even basic details of the consultants’ contract, including its cost to taxpayers.
A pill form of an effective drug for postpartum depression hit the market in December, but most insurers do not yet have a policy on when or whether they will pay for it. The hurdles to obtain its predecessor medication have advocates worried.
A court expert reported that California prisons continue to lag on 14 of 15 suicide prevention measures, and even regressed in some areas. The state could face more than $40 million in fines after a federal judge warned more than a year ago that she would impose penalties for each violation.
