The Washington Post (5/31, Meckler) reports a National Center for Education Statistics survey released Tuesday “documents the toll the pandemic has taken on students’ mental health, with 7 in 10 public schools seeing a rise in the number of children seeking services. Even more, 76 percent, said faculty and staff members have expressed concerns about depression, anxiety and trauma in students since the start of the pandemic.” The results “add to the evidence that the pandemic is leaving this generation of students with significant mental health challenges.” Despite these survey findings, “only about half of all schools said they were able to effectively provide needed services.” NCES Commissioner Peggy G. Carr said, “The pandemic has taken a clear and significant toll on students’ mental health.”

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— “The Washington Post (requires login and subscription)

MedPage Today (5/30, Ruprecht) reports, “Each day between 2017 and 2019, nearly 2,300 adolescents and young adults became new daily tobacco users – a figure that mirrors statistics from 1989 to 1993,” according to results from a longitudinal study published in Pediatrics. The study found that “the total number of daily vape (or e-cigarette) users under 21 years of age rose to more than 1 million by 2019,” and “of those, 56.3% used Juul products in particular.”

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— MedPage Today (requires login and subscription)

According to Healio (5/27, Downey), Elspeth Cameron Ritchie, MD, MPH, “discussed the mental health of female veterans, or ‘invisible veterans,’ at the American Psychiatric Association annual meeting.” Dr. Ritchie explained, “Traditionally, the services that are offered to veterans are for older, single, male, often Vietnam-era veterans.” What this means is that “women often cannot find services that are right for them, and may end up homeless or on the streets.”

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— “VIDEO: Consider special mental health needs of female veterans “Ken Downey Jr., Healio, May 27, 2022

Psychiatric News (5/27) reported, “Rheumatoid arthritis [RA] and depression have a bidirectional association in which having one condition raises the risk of developing the other,” investigators concluded in a “meta-analysis of 11 studies that included a total of 39,130 patients with rheumatoid arthritis, 550,782 patients with depression, and 7,802,230” controls. The findings were published online ahead of print in the August 15 issue of the Journal of Affective Disorders.

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— “Rheumatoid Arthritis, Depression Raise Risk of One Another, Meta-Analysis Finds, Psychiatric News, May 27, 2022

TODAY (5/27, Breen) reported, “In the aftermath of a mass casualty event” such as last week’s school shootings in Uvalde, TX, “blame swirls, often landing on…mental illness.” Research indicates, however, that “mental illness does not play a role in the vast majority of gun violence.” Rebecca Brendel, MD, JD, President of the American Psychiatric Association, stated, “When horrible events happen that are unfathomable to our minds, we look for answers, and so one answer is that there must be something terribly wrong to lead somebody to act in such a way.” Dr. Brendel added, “(But) what we know is that persons with mental illness are much less likely to commit acts of violence than others.” What does drive “mass casualty shootings and gun death, said…experts interviewed for this story, is access to guns.”

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— “Is mental illness really driving gun violence in the US? Here’s what the research says “Kerry Breen, TODAY, May 27, 2022