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Welcome to the nexus of ethics, psychology, morality, technology, health care, and philosophy
Showing posts with label Overdoses. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Overdoses. Show all posts

Tuesday, July 26, 2022

U.S. drug overdose deaths reached all-time high in 2021, CDC says

Berkeley Lovelace Jr.
NBC.com
Originally posted 11 MAY 22

More than 107,600 Americans died from drug overdoses last year, the highest annual death toll on record, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said Wednesday.

Overdose deaths increased 15 percent in 2021, up from an estimated 93,655 fatalities the year prior, according to a report from the CDC’s National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS), which collects data on a range of health topics, including drug use.

While the total number of deaths reached record highs, the increase appeared to slow compared to the change seen from 2019 to 2020, when overdose deaths rose 30 percent, according to the report.

It's still too early to say whether that slowdown will hold, said Farida Ahmad, a scientist at the health statistics center. The agency's latest report is considered provisional, meaning the data is incomplete and subject to change.

Even if the increase in overdose deaths is smaller compared to last year, the 2021 total is still a huge number, Ahmad said.

The data helps illustrate one of the consequences of the pandemic, which has seen an uptick in substance abuse amid widespread unemployment and more Americans reporting mental health issues.

Overdose-related deaths were already increasing before the pandemic, but there was "clearly a very sharp uptick during the pandemic," said Joseph Friedman, an addiction researcher at the University of California, Los Angeles. He published research in April that found drug overdose deaths among teenagers rose sharply over the last two years.

According to the NCHS report, fentanyl, a powerful synthetic opioid, was involved in the most overdose deaths in 2021: 71,238.

Thursday, November 4, 2021

The AMA needs to declare a national mental health emergency

Susan Hata and Thalia Krakower
STAT News
Originally published 6 OCT 21

As the pandemic continues to disrupt life across the U.S., a staggering number of Americans are reaching out to their primary care doctors for help with sometimes overwhelming mental health struggles. Yet primary care doctors like us have nowhere to turn when it comes to finding mental health providers for them, and our patients often suffer without the specialty care they need.

It’s time for the American Medical Association to take decisive action and declare a national mental health emergency.

More than 40% of Americans report symptoms of anxiety or depression, and emergency rooms are flooded with patients in psychiatric crises. Untreated, these issues can have devastating consequences. In 2020, an estimated 44,800 Americans lost their lives to suicide; among children ages 10 to 14, suicide is the second leading cause of death.

Finding mental health providers for patients is an uphill climb, in part because there is no centralized process for it. Timely mental health services are astonishingly difficult to obtain even in Massachusetts, where we live and work, which has the most psychologists per capita. Waitlists for therapists can be longer than six months for adults, and even longer for children.

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By declaring a mental health emergency, the AMA could galvanize health administrators and drive the innovation needed to improve the existing mental health system. When Covid-19 was named a pandemic, the U.S. health care infrastructure adapted quickly to manage the deluge of infections. Leaders nimbly and creatively mobilized resources. They redeployed staff, built field hospitals and overflow ICUs, and deferred surgeries and routine care to preserve resources and minimize hospital-based transmission of Covid-19. With proper framing and a sense of urgency, similar things can happen for the mental health care system.

To be clear, all of this is the AMA’s lane: In addition to the devastating toll of suicides and overdoses, untreated mental illness worsens cardiac outcomes, increases mortality from Covid-19, and shortens life spans. Adult mental illness also directly affects the health of children, leading to poor health outcomes across generations.