In an 1,800-word piece for CNN (9/23, Wallace), Kelly Wallace writes about binge drinking on college campuses. Wallace points out that “nearly 40% of college students” say they binge drank “– defined as five or more drinks at one time – in the past 30 days, according to the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Awareness.”

The piece goes on to discuss NIAAA’s CollegeAIM, “a matrix of 60 alcohol interventions,” which NIAAA Director George Koob hopes may be a tool that is used “like a menu at a restaurant.” Koob adds, “This isn’t for students. This is for administrators who have skills in this area and want to do something about underage drinking to go into this matrix and look at what would fit their campus in particular.”

Related Links:

— “Binge drinking 101: Learning to curb the college trend,” Kelly Wallace, CNN, September 23, 2015.

TIME (9/23, Oaklander) reports that research published in The Lancet Psychiatry suggests that “simply blocking off popular routes to suicide, like erecting a fence around a cliff’s edge, can cut down on suicide deaths enormously.” The “meta-analysis…looked specifically at what the authors call ‘suicide hotspots’: sites accessible to the public and often used as a means to suicide, like bridges, cliffs, tall buildings and railroad tracks.” The researchers “analyzed 18 studies that looked at three interventions to deter suicides at hotspots.”

Related Links:

— “One Simple Way to Reduce Some Suicides by 90%,” Mandy Oaklander, Time, September 22, 2015.

WPost Praises Virginia County’s Plan To Keep Nonviolent Individuals With Mental Illness Out Of Jail.
In an editorial, the Washington Post (9/21) writes that Virginia’s Fairfax County “has a plan to establish a fledgling program, starting Jan. 1, to divert nonviolent people who have mental illness to a county-run crisis center.”

Instead of “jailing them, police officers, trained to detect the signs of mental health crises, would be able to hand them off to a team of professional staff at the center for evaluation and formulation of a treatment plan.” The Post praises such an arrangement, and cites similar models that have been successful across the country.

According to the Post, “The question is whether county officials…have the political will to shake up an entrenched system and whether they will find the dollars to do it.”

Related Links:

— “Treatment, not jail, for mentally ill people,” Washington Post, September 20, 2015.

In a more than 1,300-word article, the Wall Street Journal (9/19, A3, Kesling, Subscription Publication) outlines an independent report reviewing the VA healthcare system that was released Friday and that warns the agency needs to make substantial changes to address a number of serious problems.

According to the Washington Post (9/19, Wax-Thibodeaux) “Federal Eye” blog, the 4,000 page study by the Rand, McKinsey, and MITRE corporations “finds that VA facilities cost twice the norm for public facilities, a claim that will likely re-launch a debate about moving towards privatizing some VA services.”

Related Links:

— “VA Needs ‘Systemwide Reworking,’ Independent Report Finds/a>,” Ben Kesling, Wall Street Journal, September 18, 2015.

HealthDay (9/18, Dallas) reports that research published online Sept. 18 in the Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry found that teens with bulimia recover faster when their parents are involved. According to study lead Daniel Le Grange, the Benioff UCSF professor in children’s health at the University of California, San Francisco Benioff Children’s Hospital San Francisco, the findings run “counter to the training that physicians receive in psychiatry, which teaches that parents are to blame for bulimia, and therefore should be omitted from treatment.”

The small study of 130 teens found that after initial treatment, 39 percent of teens who were randomly assigned to receive family-based therapy (FBT) were no longer binging and purging, compared with 20 percent of patients who received cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT). At the six-month follow up, “44 percent of FBT patients had stopped binging and purging, compared to 25 percent of CBT patients.”

Related Links:

— “Parents Should Be Involved in Teen’s Bulimia Treatment: Study,” Mary Elizabeth Dallas, HealthDay, September 18, 2015.