The New York Times (4/14, Steinhauer) reports, “Three veterans killed themselves last week on Department of Veterans Affairs health care properties, barely a month after President Trump announced an aggressive task force to address the unremitting problem of veteran suicide.” The Times says the “executive order was a tacit acknowledgment of what the deaths rendered obvious: The department has not made a dent in stemming the approximately 20 suicide deaths every day among veterans.” The article adds that “veterans are in many ways an amplification of the same factors that drive suicide in the broader American population: a fragmented health care system, a shortage of mental health resources, especially in rural areas, a lack of funding for suicide research and easy access to guns.”

Related Links:

— “V.A. Officials, and the Nation, Battle an Unrelenting Tide of Veteran Suicides, ” Jennifer Steinhauer, The New York Times, April 14, 2019

Medscape (4/11, Yasgur, Subscription Publication) reports, “Suicidal ideation (SI) occurs more frequently in adolescents with superior cognitive performance than in youngsters with lower cognition,” researchers concluded after studying “more than 6000 typically developing community-based adolescents aged 11 to 21 years and” then comparing “the cognitive and social functioning of those with and those without SI.” The findings were published online March 28 in the British Journal of Psychiatry.

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— Medscape (requires login and subscription)

Healio (4/10, Demko) reports, “In 2016, past-month daily cannabis use was about three times higher among individuals with serious psychological distress than among those without,” researchers concluded after “using data from the 2008 to 2016 National Survey on Drug Use and Health” to examine “the prevalence of daily cannabis use among U.S. adults (n=356,413) with and without serious psychological distress, as measured by the Kessler Psychological Distress Scale in 2016, and” then examining “trends in daily cannabis use by past-month psychological distress status from 2008 to 2016.” The findings were published in the April issue of the journal Drug and Alcohol Dependence.

Related Links:

— “Daily cannabis use more common among people with psychological distress, “Savannah Demko, Healio, April 10, 2019

HealthDay (4/10, Preidt) reports, “People with migraine may be much more likely to attempt suicide than others,” investigators concluded after examining “data on nearly 22,000 Canadians who took part in a 2012 community mental health survey.” The study revealed that one “in 12 adults with migraine had attempted suicide – and those with a history of sexual abuse or long-term exposure to domestic violence had a significantly higher risk.” The findings were published online April 4 in the journal Archives of Suicide Research.

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