Skip to content

mental health

How The Rhizome Therapy Cooperative Counters Burnout

“One of the things I don't think a lot of people outside the mental health field realize,” says clinical social worker Evelyn Heflin, “is that a lot of community mental health agencies, because they're underfunded, and private practices that are larger agency format, really sort of take advantage of the therapists at the bottom.”  Faced with unsustainable caseloads, a lack of additional support, and inadequate pay for the work they do—a situation grown drastically worse since the COVID pandemic began—over half of mental health clinicians reported experiencing burnout in surveys conducted between 2021 and 2024.

Over A Billion People In The World Suffer From Mental Health Ailments

I first heard the word ‘depression’ when I was about sixteen. My mother took me to the National Institute of Mental Health and Neurosciences (NIMHANS) in Bengaluru, India, to be seen by a professional for what I had just considered to be nightmares and difficult afternoons. I was lucky. Today, only 9% of people in the world receive treatment for depression. The doctor spoke to me for a long time, and I spent several days at NIMHANS being treated by this and other doctors. It was clear to me that my problems largely stemmed from a traumatic incident that took place a few years earlier, when I was raped in my school. My parents held me through the process, giving me the courage to get through the aftermath and shielding me from what they thought would be the absolute humiliation of a public display of the violence.

For-Profit Corporations Are Buying Up More Psychiatric Hospitals

As the share of U.S. adults receiving mental health care treatment steadily grows, for-profit companies are playing an increasingly important role. More than 40% of inpatient mental health beds were operated by for-profit entities as of 2021, according to unpublished data from Morgan Shields, an assistant professor at Washington University in St. Louis who studies quality in behavioral health care. That’s up from about 13% in 2010. (The number of mental health beds held relatively constant during that time.) Experts tie this growth to provisions of the Affordable Care Act, which made mental health care an essential health benefit that all insurance plans are required to cover.

The Military Occupation Of Washington, DC: Then And Now

DC residents are living under an expanded military occupation ordered by Donald Trump that many are calling “unprecedented.” However, this is not the first time this action has been taken. Understanding this history is essential to properly contextualize what is happening now and to focus on the correct narrative and issue to fight going forward. I grew up in Southeast DC after my mom moved us from our hometown of Jarratt, VA to a little apartment in a four-unit building on Parkland Place when I was about five or six years old. We enjoyed free summer concerts in the park across the street from our building. I used to walk about a half a mile to Malcolm X Elementary school during the week, and to Liff’s Market across the street from that school every Sunday to get the paper for my mom and snacks for myself.

Mental Health Professionals Join Calls For Boycott Of Advertising Agencies

Health organisations should cut ties with advertising agencies that work for the fossil fuel industry to protest the role of greenwashing in delaying climate action, says a group of mental health advocates. In an open letter, a dozen researchers and clinicians warned of the growing toll of despair suffered by displaced families, the disorientation and grief communities face after floods, drought and wildfires, and the anxiety of children facing a worsening climate crisis. “Advertising and public relations firms that serve both the health sector and the fossil fuel industry are working at cross purposes.

Long Strike Yields Big Gains For Kaiser Mental Health Workers

The 196-day strike of Kaiser Southern California mental healthcare workers is over. The 2,400 therapists, psychiatric nurses, social workers and psychologists won significant gains not just for themselves but for their patients in a time of an acute national mental healthcare crisis. They are members of the National Union of Healthcare Workers. They outlasted Kaiser, the huge California-based health maintenance organization, with six and a half months of picket lines from Modesto to San Diego. They held rallies at Kaiser’s Southern California medical centers. They blockaded the Sunset Strip. They held a hunger strike, putting their own health on the line to improve care for patients and reverse Kaiser’s record of misconduct.

Kaiser Strikers Say When Therapists Burn Out, Patients Suffer

I work as a medical social worker in the infectious diseases clinic, working primarily with patients who have been diagnosed with HIV and AIDS. I help my patients navigate Kaiser’s complex health care system, get access to needed resources, and figure out how they can afford a life-sustaining medication that often costs thousands of dollars per month. I see firsthand how Kaiser’s mental health system is failing these patients. It’s nearly impossible for them to get access to timely mental health care, and because Kaiser treats its therapists like assembly-line factory workers, so many therapists get burned out and leave.

No Child Should Be A Target

The Palestine-Global Mental Health Network, along with its international counterparts, is now launching an international campaign to demand that world governments hold Israel accountable to the principles of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child—principles which prioritize the inherent right to life and uphold the best interests of all children. The genocidal intentions of the Zionist settler-colonial state, recognized by many as Israel, (hereinafter referred to as Israel), are made clear in various documented statements by its officials. The former Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant has derogatorily referred to Palestinians as “human animals”, while Israeli President Isaac Herzog has stated, “there are no innocent civilians in Gaza”.

UnitedHealth’s Playbook For Limiting Coverage Puts Countless People At Risk

For years, it was a mystery: Seemingly out of the blue, therapists would feel like they’d tripped some invisible wire and become a target of UnitedHealth Group. A company representative with the Orwellian title “care advocate” would call and grill them about why they’d seen a patient twice a week or weekly for six months. In case after case, United would refuse to cover care, leaving patients to pay out-of-pocket or go without it. The severity of their issues seemed not to matter. Around 2016, government officials began to pry open United’s black box.

When You Suffer For Your Sanity And Struggle To Get Free

In 1930, Clément Fraisse (1901–1980), a shepherd from France’s Lozère region, was confined in a nearby psychiatric hospital after he tried to burn down his parents’ farmhouse. For two years, he was held in a dark, narrow cell. Using a spoon, and later the handle of his chamber pot, Fraisse carved symmetrical images into the rough, wooden walls that surrounded him. Despite the inhumane conditions in these psychiatric hospitals, Fraisse made beautiful art in the darkness of his cell. Not far from Lozère is the monastery of Saint Paul de Mausole in Saint-Rémy-de-Provence, where Vincent van Gogh had been confined four decades earlier (1889–1890) and where he completed around 150 paintings, including several important works (among them The Starry Night, 1889).

Fighting Privatization Is Good For Mental Health

This spring, Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson announced a dramatic change in the city’s mental health policy, promising to reopen public clinics shuttered for more than a decade. Today, my administration is taking extraordinary steps to reverse the course and expand our city’s systems of mental health,” Johnson said May 30, outside the Roseland Mental Health Center. ​“We are standing here on the Far South Side to make it clear that we are prioritizing those who have been left behind and discarded by previous administrations.” In addition to Roseland, the city plans to reopen two more public clinics, in the Pilsen and West Garfield Park neighborhoods.

Here’s How Non-Police Crisis Response Programs Have Been Working

Over the past three years, tens of thousands of people in crisis have been met with behavioral health specialists and social workers instead of police officers. Interactions like these are taking place across the country more often today compared to previous years. While unarmed crisis responders have existed for decades, public outrage over the 2020 police killings of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Daniel Prude, and many others prompted cities to create new ways to respond to people in crisis. Police are often called to respond to situations involving people experiencing mental health crises—with disastrous results.

The Final Nail In Psychiatry’s Antidepressant Coffin

Historically, there have always been some patients who report that any treatment for depression—including bloodletting—has worked for them, but science demands that for a treatment to be deemed truly effective, it must work better than a placebo or the passage of time without any treatment. This is especially important for antidepressant drugs—including Prozac, Zoloft, and other selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs), as well as Effexor, Cymbalta, and other serotonin and norepinephrine reuptake inhibitors (SNRIs)—because all of these drugs have uncontroversial troubling side effects.

Hidden Toll Of Hurricane Katrina On The Mental Health Of Black Survivors

When Hurricane Katrina touched down in New Orleans in late August 2005, nine-year-old Nia Burnett was too young to realize that her life would never be the same. Nia's family had chosen to stay in the city and wait out the storm. They all headed to a local hospital for safety. What they found were corpses lining the hallways. The whole building smelled like rotten flesh. Nia remembers later standing on the roof after the hospital started flooding, waiting to be rescued. Below her, she watched as all the neighborhoods she used to play in with her friends were swallowed up by the rising waters. Meanwhile, even more bodies floated around the hospital. It wasn't until 11 years after the storm that Nia was diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder.

Kaiser’s Massive Mental Health Care Settlement Sends Strong Message

Kaiser Permanente’s $200 million settlement with the State of California for its repeated failures to provide patients with adequate and timely mental health care was a long while coming. The deficiencies themselves? Kaiser’s own employees say they’ve been hiding in plain sight. “Years and years of banging our heads against the wall have finally paid off,” said Ilana Marcucci-Morris, a therapist at Kaiser Permanente’s Oakland Medical Center. “This has the potential to make Kaiser a leader in mental health care, rather than a serial violator of mental health care laws.” The settlement, announced late Thursday by the state’s Department of Managed Health Care, includes a $50 million fine.
assetto corsa mods

Urgent End Of Year Fundraising Campaign

Online donations are back! Keep independent media alive. 

Due to the attacks on our fiscal sponsor, we were unable to raise funds online for nearly two years.  As the bills pile up, your help is needed now to cover the monthly costs of operating Popular Resistance.

Urgent End Of Year Fundraising Campaign

Online donations are back! 

Keep independent media alive. 

Due to the attacks on our fiscal sponsor, we were unable to raise funds online for nearly two years.  As the bills pile up, your help is needed now to cover the monthly costs of operating Popular Resistance.

Sign Up To Our Daily Digest

Independent media outlets are being suppressed and dropped by corporations like Google, Facebook and Twitter. Sign up for our daily email digest before it’s too late so you don’t miss the latest movement news.