Week of July 14–18, 2025

General Mental Health

• In the last decade, the federal government has provided $146 million to organizations that provide outpatient care to people with serious mental health conditions like psychosis. The people were ordered to undergo treatment so they wouldn’t be a threat to themselves or society. Read more here.
  
• Beginning next summer, Minnesotans scrolling social media sites will get a pop-up warning. Before they can proceed to photos, articles, or posts, they’ll have to click through the warning, acknowledging the site could pose a hazard to their mental health. Read more here.
• Dr. Scott Zeller, past president of the American Association for Emergency Psychiatry and vice president of acute psychiatry at Vituity, has long been troubled by disparities in emergency medicine. “When you come to the emergency room with an asthma attack, staff start you on treatment right away,” he said, adding that emergency medical care aims to treat the person and discharge them or admit them to the hospital.  That’s not the case with mental health emergencies. People can spend hours languishing, without treatment, in the emergency room waiting for an inpatient psychiatric bed. Read more here.

 The Opioid Crisis

• President Trump signed legislation aimed at cracking down on illegal fentanyl and toughening prison sentences for those who traffic the drug. Trump signed the Halt All Lethal Trafficking of Fentanyl Act at a White House ceremony, where he was joined by lawmakers and individuals whose family members have died from fentanyl overdoses. Read more here.
  
• The Trump administration has delayed and may cancel roughly $140 million in grants to fund fentanyl overdose response efforts, according to four staff members with close knowledge of the process at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Read more here.

 988 Hotline

• The National Suicide and Crisis Lifeline — 988 — launched three years ago. Millions of people have contacted 988 since the line was launched, through calls, texts, and the 988-chat box. A new study led by researchers at NYU and Johns Hopkins University estimates that 1.6% of the U.S. population used the line between July of 2022 and December of 2024 alone. People who call the line seeking support are connected to a local network of crisis centers and a trained crisis counselor. Read more here.
  
• States and mental health organizations are bracing for the closure of a specialized service within 988, the National Suicide and Crisis Lifeline, for LGBTQ youth under orders from the Trump administration amid its broader spending cuts and the dismantling of programs dedicated to diversity and inclusion. Read more here.

 AI and Mental Health

• Something troubling is happening to our brains as artificial intelligence platforms become more popular. Studies are showing that professional workers who use ChatGPT to carry out tasks might lose critical thinking skills and motivation. People are forming strong emotional bonds with chatbots, sometimes exacerbating feelings of loneliness. Others are having psychotic episodes after talking to chatbots for hours each day. Read more here.

Research

• Medicaid reimbursement for postpartum depression (PPD) screening at well-child visits may increase detection and treatment of PPD in the first year postpartum, a cohort study in Colorado found. Read more here.

Medicaid and the ACA

• A coalition of 20 Democratic attorneys general sued the Trump administration to block implementation of a rule they argue will undermine the Affordable Care Act. The complaint was co-led by California, Massachusetts, and New Jersey and filed in federal court in Massachusetts. The lawsuit alleges the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) illegally made changes to the health law, which will make it harder for people to enroll and will shift costs to states.  Read more here.
  
  President Donald Trump's spending bill is set to raise administrative costs and make managing costs more difficult for insurers like UnitedHealthcare and CVS Health's Aetna that operate Medicaid health plans, experts say. As a result, those insurers will likely pull back their Medicaid coverage and invest more in existing markets to retain their healthier members, experts said. Read more here.
• When President Trump signed the One Big Beautiful Bill Act into law on the Fourth of July, many people heard about the major provisions that affected healthcare, such as hundreds of millions of dollars in cuts to Medicaid and a 1-year, 2.5% increase in payments under the Medicare Physician Fee Schedule. However, what about some of the lesser-known health provisions? Read more here.
   
  The new Medicaid work rules in President Trump's tax-and-spending law put states on a tight timetable for setting up systems to notify millions of recipients about the requirements — and to track if they're complying. Previous efforts to set work rules in Georgia and Arkansas showed it could be a messy and expensive process that generally relies on outside vendors to set up the necessary infrastructure. Read more here.
  

Federal and State Policy

• The Trump administration is proposing a pay bump for physicians in 2026, alongside new reforms that align with the agency's Make America Healthy Again positioning. The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services released the proposed physician fee schedule, which would set the conversion factor, or the amount that Medicare pays per work relative value unit, at $33.42, an increase of 3.62% over the 2025 rate of $32.35. Read more here.