MedPage Today (1/8, Gever) reports that according to research partly sponsored by the National Institute of Mental Health published in the Jan. 8 issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association, “smoking rates among Americans with mental illnesses didn’t budge from 2004 to 2011, a period during which rates in the rest of the population fell 14%.” In fact, “data from the federal Medical Expenditure Panel Survey (MEPS) found that, among respondents with mental illnesses, 25.3% reported current smoking in 2004-2005 (95% CI 24.2%-26.3%), versus 24.9% in 2010-2011 (95% CI 23.8%-26.0%, P=0.50) after adjustments for other predictors of smoking such as income and education.” Meanwhile, over that same time frame, “adjusted smoking rates in other MEPS respondents declined from 19.2% (95% CI 18.7%-19.7%) to 16.5% (95% CI 16.0%-17.0%, P<0.001),” the study found. Psychiatric News (1/8) also covers the story. Related Links:

— “Smoking Rates Still High Among the Mentally Ill, “John Gever, MedPage Today, January 7, 2014.

The Washington Times (1/8, Sherfinski) reports that the Obama Administration is considering “weighing whether people deemed mentally ill as minors should be barred from getting guns as adults.” On Jan. 7, the Department of Justice, “which is trying to bolster the national background check system, asked the public to comment on whether information about mental illnesses of minors should be included in the databases.” Yesterday, the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) also “published a proposed rule…to try to make it easier to disclose peoples’ identities to the” National Instant Criminal Background Check System (NICS).

Related Links:

— “Mental illness in youth could prevent gun purchases in adulthood, ” David Sherfinski, The Washington Times, January 7, 2014.

The Washington Post (1/7, Joyce) “On Parenting” blog reports that a study appearing in the journal Psychological Science has determined that “heaping praise on a child with low self-esteem only does more damage,” and may cause them to shrink from new challenges. One experiment “found adults gave inflated praise to children with low self-esteem twice as often as they did to more confident children.” Another study found a group of children were more likely to seek out difficult tasks if they had high self-esteem, whereas children with low self-esteem refrained from “taking on bigger challenges” in an effort not to avoid being a disappointment.

Related Links:

— “Stop heaping praise on your kids., “Marvin Joseph, The Washington Post, January 6, 2014.

Medscape (1/7, Laidman) reports that according to a study (1/1) published online Jan. 6 in the journal Pediatrics, “teaching caregivers about normal infant sleeping and crying patterns and providing them with information on infant settling techniques improved maternal depression scores.” The study involved 770 families of 781 babies. The intervention began about a month after birth, when some of the families were “given a booklet and a DVD that covered normal sleep and crying patterns, techniques for settling infants, information on possible medical causes of crying, and parent self-care advice.” The information was reinforced twice more at the eight-week and 13-week marks. Notably, at “six months, caregivers in the intervention group were less likely to score higher than 9 on the Edinburgh Postnatal Depression Scale, with 7.9% scoring higher than 9 in the intervention group vs 12.9% in the control cohort (adjusted odds ratio [AOR], 0.57; 95% CI, 0.34 – 0.94; P = .03).”

The Los Angeles Times (1/7, MacVean) “Science Now” blog reports that according to a review (1/7) published online Jan. 6 in JAMA Internal Medicine, “mindfulness meditation can help ease anxiety, depression and pain.” The review did not find much evidence, however, that “meditation helped other conditions including substance abuse or sleep and attention problems.”

The Wall Street Journal (1/7, D2, Gellman, Subscription Publication) reports that researchers arrived at those conclusions after examining data from 47 randomized clinical studies involving more than 3,500 participants.

Related Links:

— “Meditation can help with anxiety, pain, depression, study says, “Mary MacVean, Los Angeles Times, January 6, 2014.

Bloomberg News (1/5, Kearns) reports “falling stocks get people worried sick,” noting that a “one-day drop in the stock around 1.5 percent is followed by about a 0.26 percent increase in hospital admissions on average over the next two days,” citing a March 2013 study by Joseph Engelberg and Christopher Parsons, associate professors of finance at the University of California at San Diego. Engelberg, who presented the study at the American Economic Association’s annual meeting in Philadelphia, said “It’s a very straightforward result.” The article says “the results were based on almost” 30 years of daily admission data for California hospitals. In fact, hospital admissions “rise on days when shares fall,” and “people are hospitalized disproportionately for mental conditions.”

Related Links:

— “Stocks Worry Investors Sick as Losses Spur More Hospital Visits, “Jeff Kearns, Bloomberg News, January 5, 2014.

USA Today (1/6, Healy) reports that according to a study published online Jan. 6 in the journal Pediatrics, allowing kids and teens to rest their brains following a concussion may lead to a faster recovery. The study, which involved 335 young people ranging in age from eight to 23, revealed that “those reporting the greatest levels of cognitive activity (including homework, playing video games, doing crossword puzzles, text messaging and online activities) after a concussion took the longest to fully recover from their symptoms – approximately 100 days on average, compared to approximately 20 to 50 days for patients reporting lesser levels of activity.”

Related Links:

— “Evidence shows cognitive rest aids concussion recovery, “Michelle Healy, USA Today, January 6, 2014.

In his column for the New York Times (1/5, Subscription Publication), Nicholas Kristof invited readers to tell him about the issues they think “deserve more attention in 2014,” and his own is mental health. He says that mental illness in the US poses “a greater risk to our well-being than, say, the Afghan Taliban or Al Qaeda terrorists, yet in polite society there is still something of a code of silence around these topics.” He says media outlets are complicit, because too much coverage focuses on extreme cases, when progress is possible. Kristof says the topic is “not sexy, and it doesn’t involve Democrats and Republicans screaming at each other, but it is a source of incalculable suffering that can be remedied.”

Related Links:

— “First Up, Mental Illness. Next Topic Is Up to You., “Nicholas Kristof, The New York Times, January 4, 2014.

The Los Angeles Times (1/4, Morin) “Science Now” blog reported that while “a history of depression among expectant mothers remains the greatest single risk factor for postpartum depression, a new study finds that fear of childbirth may also predispose some women to the condition.” Investigators, in a study “published Friday in the journal BMJ Open…concluded that fear of childbirth increases the risk of postpartum depression about threefold in women without a history of depression, and fivefold in women with known depressive disease.”

Related Links:

— “Fear of childbirth linked to postpartum depression, study finds, “Monte Morin, Los Angeles Times, January 3, 2014.

Research suggesting that Medicaid expansion may not lead to a reduction in emergency department (ED) use was covered on one of last night’s national news broadcasts, in print in several newspapers, including in two front-page stories, and on several websites. Nearly all sources point out that the findings appear to refute the contention, often espoused by supporters of the Affordable Care Act, that expanding Medicaid would reduce ED use. The CBS Evening News (1/2, story 5, 2:00, Dubois) reported, “A new report out today calls into question one of the main goals of the” ACA: “to get people to stop using the” ED “as their primary care doctor by making more of them eligible for Medicaid.”

In a front-page story, the New York Times (1/3, A1, Tavernise, Subscription Publication) reports that the research, “published in the journal Science, compared thousands of low-income people in the Portland,” Oregon “area who were randomly selected in a 2008 lottery to get Medicaid coverage with people who entered the lottery but remained uninsured.” Individuals “who gained coverage made 40 percent more visits to the” ED “than their uninsured counterparts.” The researchers found that “the pattern was so strong that it held true across most demographic groups, times of day, and types of visits, including for conditions that were treatable in primary care settings.”

Related Links:

— “Emergency Visits Seen Increasing With Health Law, “Sabrina Tavernise, The New York Times, January 02, 2014.