Employers Face Difficulty Balancing Need For Safety Against Employees’ Privacy Rights. Focusing on patient confidentiality, the CBS Evening News (4/1, story 7, 2:15, Pelley) reported that in the US, “45 states have laws requiring or permitting mental health professionals to disclose if they believe a patient is dangerous.” CBS News correspondent Jeff Pegues explained, however that even though “some privacy advocates agree that there are cases where warning law enforcement is necessary…they worry about a chilling effect on patients.” Chad Marlow, of the American Civil Liberties Union, was shown saying, “You might deter people from seeking mental health services in order to avoid disclosing things they want to keep private.” Meanwhile, “here in the US,” according to Pegues, “the Federal Aviation Administration mandates that airline pilots self-report mental health issues,” but “the FAA says it’s too early to discuss whether the protocols will be strengthened.”

In an article on the difficulties of balancing employers’ and the general public’s needs for safety against employees’ privacy rights and ability to work without suffering from the stigma of having a mental health disorder, the Wall Street Journal (4/2, Silverman, Feintzeig, Subscription Publication) reports that forensic psychiatrist Steven Hoge, MD, who chairs the American Psychiatric Association’s Council on Psychiatry and the Law, explained that under certain limited circumstances, management can give orders to employees to undergo mental-health evaluations as a condition of keeping their employment.

Related Links:

— “After Airline Tragedy, New Focus on Mental Health at Work,” RACHEL EMMA SILVERMAN and RACHEL FEINTZEIG, Wall Street Journal, April 1, 2015.

USA Today (4/2, Zoroya) reports that a “massive study” conducted by the Defense Department’s National Center for Telehealth and Technology at Joint Base Lewis-McChord in Washington state and published online April 1 in JAMA Psychiatry suggests there is “no link between being deployed in or near a war zone and a high risk of suicide.” Researchers, who focused on “3.9 million US troops who served during the first six years after” the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks, “found almost no difference between the suicide rates of those who deployed versus those who did not.”

The New York Times (4/2, A15, Philipps, Subscription Publication) reports that the study “also tracked suicides of military personnel after they left the military, by linking records kept by the Pentagon and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.” The authors of the study and other experts “cautioned, however, that the findings do not rule out combat exposure as a reason for the increase in suicides, adding that more information was needed.” Michael Schoenbaum, “a researcher at the National Institute of Mental Health who led a 2014 study on suicides in the Army,” said, “You can be deployed without being in combat.” He added, “This data set wasn’t able to sort people by their exposure to the physical acts of war. That is the next step.”

Related Links:

— “Study: No link between suicide and serving in or near war zones,” Gregg Zoroya, USA Today, April 1, 2015.

The Hill (4/1, Carney) reports that Sen. Joni Ernst (R-IA) has introduced a bill “to strengthen veterans’ mental healthcare by making it easier to get help outside of the Department of Veterans Affairs.” The measure “would amend the Veterans’ Access, Choice, and Accountability Act, to allow veterans access to non-VA mental healthcare if they can show the agency is not giving them ‘adequate or timely’ care.” In addition, the proposed legislation would “roll back a requirement that veterans must live more than 40 miles away from a VA facility or have waited longer than 30 days before accessing non-VA mental healthcare.”

Related Links:

— “Ernst offers bill to improve veterans’ access to mental healthcare,” Jordain Carney, The Hill, March 32, 2015.

Medscape (4/1, Johnson) reports that research indicates that “the risk for suicide and accidental death is higher in the first year after a diagnosis of prostate cancer than other cancers.” While “the risk for suicide is not higher overall…it is during the first year, ‘specifically in men who are not treated,’ said investigator Christian Meyer, MD.” The “finding comes from an analysis of diagnosis data from the Surveillance, Epidemiology, and End Results (SEER) database, presented…at the European Association of Urology 30th Annual Congress.”

Related Links:

— Medscape (requires login and subscription)

Medscape (4/1, Brauser) reports that research presented March 28 at the American Association for Geriatric Psychiatry’s annual meeting suggests that “receiving a diagnosis of a life-threatening illness may be a significant determinant of suicidal ideation in older adults.” The study, which included “more than 3000 adults aged 55 years or older, showed that those who had a traumatic accident/illness were three times more likely to also have suicidal ideation than those who did not experience that type of trauma.” But, “within this trauma category, only life-threatening illness was significantly associated with late-life suicidal ideation; a life-threatening accident or toxic chemical/substance exposure did not have significant associations.”

Related Links:

— Medscape (requires login and subscription)

In a blog post for Reuters (3/31), suicide prevention experts Christopher Gandin Le and Jennifer Gandin Le outlined the two steps they believe will help avoid another aviation incident like Germanwings flight 9525. First of all, increased mental health screening is a good idea, they argue, as FAA currently requires that pilots self-report suicidal tendencies, but privacy must also be taken into consideration, lest employees harbor a fear of reprisal for reporting medical conditions. At the same time, the conversation about mental health should not stigmatize anyone with a disorder, and the authors praise the Air Force Suicide Prevention Program as a successful program in this respect.

Related Links:

— “Two-step approach to preventing the next Germanwings disaster,” Christopher and Jennifer Gandin Le, Reuters, March 31, 2015.

The investigation into the March 24 Germanwings flight 9525 crash and new revelations about the mental health of 27-year-old co-pilot Andreas Lubitz continue to feature prominently in national outlets. Coverage of the story led evening television news broadcasts and appeared on the front page of several leading newspapers. Yesterday, Germanwings’ parent company Lufthansa revealed that Lubitz had emailed the company’s flight training school in 2009 about his clinical history with depression.

ABC World News (3/31, lead story, 2:25, Muir) broadcast that Lufthansa “knew of that young co-pilot’s troubling medical history,” that “he suffered a severe bout of depression, even before they hired him.”

The CBS Evening News (3/31, lead story, 2:15, Pelley) reported that “Lubitz had been treated for suicidal tendencies,” as evidenced by his medical history, but Lufthansa CEO Carsten Spohr maintains that “Lubitz was 100 percent air-worthy, without any restrictions.” The CBS Evening News added that, in Germany, physicians “are not obliged to tell airlines if pilots have problems that would preclude them from flying.”

HealthDay (3/31, Mozes) reports that research presented at the American Society for Nutrition’s annual meeting and funded by the National Institutes of Health suggests that “a single serving of leafy green vegetables each day may help keep dementia away.” After assessing “the eating habits and mental ability of more than 950 older adults for an average of five years,” researchers found that seniors “who consumed one or two servings of foods such as spinach, kale, mustard greens and/or collards daily experienced slower mental deterioration than those who ate no leafy greens at all.”

Related Links:

— “Lots of Leafy Greens Might Shield Aging Brains, Study Finds,” Alan Mozes, HealthDay, March 30, 2015.

In The Hill (3/30) “Congress Blog,” Andrew Sperling, director of Federal legislative advocacy for the National Alliance on Mental Illness, voiced his concern “about a proposal that would force sudden pharmaceutical changes on low-income Americans already struggling to maintain their health and well-being.” Under a proposed rule change to Medicare Part D benefits, for “beneficiaries whose very limited financial resources make them qualified for federal low-income subsidies or are dually eligible for both Medicare and Medicaid, their copayments for brand name drugs would double.”

This could be disastrous for some patients living with a mental illness, Sperling argued, because “the mere switch of a drug from the name brand to generic versions can trigger episodes that represent a huge setback on that patient’s path toward better health and a productive life.” In some cases, there is no suitable substitute generic medication. Sperling urges Congress not to “impose artificial barriers between low-income Americans and the medicines they need.”

Related Links:

— “Mental health matters and consistency counts,” Andrew Sperling, The Hill, March 30, 2015.

USA Today (3/30, Frank) reports according to an NTSB crash report, “at least 44 private pilots in the US have committed suicide in the past 30 years by deliberately crashing their small airplanes.” The NTSB report found that “all of the suicidal pilots were men, and many had recently faced break-ups with wives or girlfriends, or had confronted legal troubles.”

Related Links:

— “Dozens of amateur pilots used airplanes for suicide,” Thomas Frank, USA Today, April 2, 2015.