Most ex-cons are unlikely to receive substance use treatment following their release from prison, even though odds are high they are struggling with addiction, a new study finds. National estimates suggest as many as 85% of inmates leave prison with some form of substance abuse problem, researchers said. But only 17% of ex-cons on Medicaid in Virginia have been diagnosed with substance use disorders, and even fewer have been prescribed addiction-fighting medication, investigators found. “This research shows that many people aren’t getting the medical attention they need as they transition back to their communities,” said lead researcher Peter Cunningham, interim chair of the Virginia Commonwealth University Department of Health Policy. For the study, researchers used data from Virginia’s health and corrections departments to track the number of people diagnosed and treated for addiction following their release from prison. More than 4,600 adults were released from county jails and state prisons in 2022, and 85% enrolled in Medicaid within one month of release, the study found. “The good news is that we see a high number of individuals enrolling in Medicaid soon after they are released from prison, and that is in large part due to the state expanding Medicaid coverage in 2019,” Cunningham said in a university news release. However, only 17% had seen a doctor and been diagnosed with a substance use disorder within…  read on >  read on >

Anne Helms is one busy mom, constantly juggling the demands of working from home with parenting two young children. Despite that whirl of activity, Helms says she often feels isolated and lonely. “I work from home full time and I actually have a job where I’m on camera a lot and I’m Zoom calling people very often,” Helms, who lives in Columbus, Ohio, said in a news release. “However, you don’t get the small talk, so you don’t get the, ‘How are your children? How’s it going?’ And you don’t get a lot of genuine answers when you do ask, ‘How is it going?’” Helms added. “There are some days where the most chit-chat or idle talk that I get is with my dog because I work alone,” she said. Helms isn’t the only parent to struggle with busy loneliness, according to a new national survey from Ohio State University’s Wexner Medical Center. A broad majority of parents experience isolation, loneliness and burnout as a result of the demands of parenthood, the survey reveals: About two-thirds of parents (66%) said the demands of parenthood sometimes or frequently feel isolating and lonely Nearly as many, 62%, feel burned out by their responsibilities as a parent Nearly two in five (38%) feel they have no one to support them in their parenting About four in five (79%)…  read on >  read on >

“Dream it, be it” might sound like a cliche, but a new study says there’s something to the notion. Teenagers who set ambitious goals for themselves tend to be more successful as young adults, researchers reported recently in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. Teens who set higher educational and career goals “tended to have higher educational attainment, income, occupational creativity, occupational prestige and job complexity after 12 years,” said researcher Rodica Damian, an associate professor of psychology with the University of Houston. That doesn’t mean that a person’s goals won’t change, researchers said. Some dreams fall away, while other goals remain strong and new ones come to the fore. But setting early goals related to education and accomplishment appeared to consistently predict better income, and tweaks in these goals tended to predict having a challenging, higher-prestige career, results show. For the study, researchers tracked two national groups of Icelandic youth across 12 years, from their late teenage years into young adulthood. Researchers examined how life goals developed with age, and how the goals set by teenagers related to their accomplishments in education and career. “For educational attainment, the strongest effects were found for education goals. Both initial levels and slopes of education goals were positively associated with educational attainment in both samples,” Damian said. “This indicates that adolescents with higher education goals, and…  read on >  read on >

Many people with tough-to-treat depression may be trying psilocybin, the active ingredient in magic mushrooms, as an alternative to antidepressants. Thinking that it’s a “natural” drug, folks might assume it comes without side effects. That assumption would be wrong. People in a new study who took psilocybin often experienced headache, nausea, anxiety, dizziness and elevated blood pressure — side effects similar to those seen with regular antidepressants, according to a team from the University of Georgia in Athens (UGA). The good news: Such side effects were only temporary. It’s less clear if longer-term side effects might emerge with time, the researchers noted. The short-term side effects “are what we may expect from your traditional antidepressants because those medications work in a similar fashion to psilocybin. They both target serotonin receptors,” explained senior study author Dr. Joshua Caballero, an associate professor in UGA’s College of Pharmacy. “It’s very encouraging,” he added in a university news release, “because the studies we examined consist of just one or two doses per patient, and we’re finding that the beneficial effects of psilocybin may stay for months when treating depression.” Psilocybin was shunned by the medical community for decades because, at higher doses, it can have hallucinatory properties. But used under the guidance and supervision of a therapist, the drug is having a comeback as a new form of antidepressant. But…  read on >  read on >

Many people dogged by depression are turning to the psilocybin found in “magic mushrooms” to ease the condition, and often reporting success. Now, new research suggests much of the credit for that success lies in the relationship between the patient and his or her therapist. It’s the magic of what researchers at Ohio State University (OSU) described as a trust-filled “therapeutic alliance.” In their study of psilocybin for depression, “what persisted the most was the connection between the therapeutic alliance and long-term outcomes, which indicates the importance of a strong relationship,” said lead researcher Adam Levin. He’s a psychiatry and behavioral health resident at OSU’s college of medicine. The findings are based on a re-analysis of data from a 2021 study involving 24 adults with depression. All received two doses of psilocybin plus 11 hours of psychotherapy. The participants also completed a questionnaire that assessed the strength of the therapist-participant relationship. They filled out this therapeutic alliance checklist three times: After eight hours of “preparation therapy” prior to getting the psilocybin, and then one week after each drug treatment. The patient-therapist “alliance score” tended to rise over time, and it correlated with what the researchers called “acute mystical and/or psychologically insightful experiences from the drug treatment.” The stronger these mystical experiences, the better the results when it came to lowered depression — at least over…  read on >  read on >

A British study finds that beyond the physical pain and turmoil of an mpox diagnosis, many of the mostly gay and bisexual men infected during the 2022 outbreak faced stigma, homophobia and shame. Mpox is spread largely through skin-to-skin contact, and the outbreak in Europe and the United States was largely localized to men who have sex with men. Cases were first detected in May of 2022, and the outbreak peaked in August. A vaccine against the disease had already been approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration in 2019 and was rolled out to at-risk people once the outbreak emerged. According to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the outbreak of mpox (formerly known as monkeypox) viral illness in the United States sickened more than 32,000 people and killed 58. In the United Kingdom, there were over 3,700 confirmed cases of mpox. The illness is characterized by painful skin lesions that form scabs, and it can be especially harmful in people infected with HIV. In the new study,  a team led by Dr. Charles Witzel, of the University College London (UCL) Institute for Global Health, conducted in-depth interviews with 22 gay and bisexual men who’d been diagnosed with mpox during the outbreak. The interviews focused on their experience with the illness itself, as well as the men’s interactions with health care…  read on >  read on >

Women who smoke and become pregnant may worry that the weight gain that comes with quitting might bring its own harms to themselves or their baby. However, a new study confirms the health benefits of quitting smoking still far exceed any weight-linked concerns. Weight gain can occur once women decide to forgo cigarettes, but even that can be minimized, said a team led by Morgan Dunn. She’s a final year obstetrics and gynecology resident at Rutgers Robert Wood Johnson Medical School in New Jersey. “We recommend that doctors advise patients to quit while offering nutrition counseling that might minimize the weight gain,” she said in a Rutgers news release. The study was published recently in the journal Hypertension. In the study, Dunn’s group looked at data on health outcomes in over 22 million pregnancies. They found that rates of dangerous hypertension in pregnancy did rise among women who quit smoking. It occurred in 6.8% of pregnancies to nonsmoking women, compared to 8.6% of pregnancies for women who quit smoking when they learned they were pregnant. The percentage rose even higher — to 17% — among women who quit smoking at the outset of a pregnancy and then gained weight that exceeded recommended levels, Dunn’s team found. However, any risk linked to a rise in blood pressure during pregnancy for former smokers were easily eclipsed by…  read on >  read on >

Teenagers are frequently bullied about their weight on social media, and the bullying increases with each hour they spend on these sites, a new study reveals. Nearly one in five teens (17%) said they’d experienced weight-related bullying online, according to results published April 17 in the journal PLOS One. “This experience can have adverse effects, including poor body image, disordered eating behaviors and anxiety and depression symptoms,” said the research team led by David Hammond. He’s a professor with the University of Waterloo School of Public Health Sciences in Ontario, Canada. Further, each additional hour of social media use brought with it a 13% increase in weight-related bullying, researchers calculated. “Notably, greater time spent on screens [was] associated with a greater prevalence of experiencing weight-related bullying,” the researchers reported.  Twitter, now known as X, was the most toxic site, with teens there 69% more likely to be bullied regarding their weight. However, Twitter was also the least-used social media platform among teens, with only 22% saying they used it. But more popular social media sites also had an increased risk of bullying over weight, researchers found: Instagram, used by 55% of teens, had a 35% increased risk of weight bullying Facebook, used by 50% of teens, had a 39% increased risk TikTok, used by 49% of teens, had a 26% increased risk Snapchat, used by…  read on >  read on >