NBC Nightly News (7/6, story 7, 1:50, Guthrie) reported, “As this country battles the opioid drug crisis, the CDC reported today that far too many people are still being prescribed those highly addictive painkillers and for too long. The warning came despite the fact that the number of prescriptions was down actually over a five-year period.”

In “Health & Science,” the Washington Post (7/6, Bernstein) reports that the number of prescriptions written for opioid pain medications “declined between 2012 and 2015,” according to data by the Centers For Disease Control and Prevention. According to the Post, the data introduce “a glimmer of progress in efforts to quell the worst drug epidemic in US history.” According to CDC Acting Director Dr. Anne Schuchat, “It looks a little bit better, but you really have to put that in context. We’re still seeing too many people get too much for too long.”

The New York Times (7/6, Goodnough, Subscription Publication) reports that the CDC analysis found that the prescribing rate “fell by 18 percent between 2010 and 2015, though it increased in 23 percent of counties,” and is still “three times as high as in 1999, when the nation’s problem with opioid addiction was just getting started.” The analysis found “tremendous regional variation” in the prescription of opioids.

STAT (7/6, Joseph) reports that the analysis “found that every part of the country had counties that had much higher prescribing rates than others, which officials said was a sign that clinicians did not have standards to use or disregarded them when prescribing opioids for pain.”

Related Links:

— “Opioid prescriptions dropped for the first time in the modern drug crisis,” Lenny Bernstein, Washington Post, July 6, 2017.

NPR (7/9, Smart) reports in its “Shots” blog that a “little-talked-about” aspect of the Affordable Care Act was increased “access to mental health care for the poor.” The author says that for some individuals, “access to mental health care can mean the difference between” working and not working. In the article, several members of the mental health industry express concern that Medicaid “rollbacks” proposed by Congress could reverse the progress made for people suffering from mental illness.

Related Links:

— “For Many, Medicaid Provides The Only Route To Mental Health Care,” ALISON KODJAK, NPR, July 9, 2017.

MD Magazine (7/9, Bender) reported, “Patients with severe affective disorder are less likely to require psychiatric inpatient readmission within 30 days of discharge if they have received electroconvulsive therapy (ECT),” researchers found after analyzing data from “inpatient databases across nine states in” the US. The findings of the study, which included data on some 162,691 patients, were published online June 28 in JAMA Psychiatry.

Related Links:

— “ECT Reduces Hospitalizations Along with Depression,” Kenneth Bender, MD Magazine, July 9, 2017.

Healio (6/30, Oldt) reported that “lithium, but not valproate, significantly reduced suicidal behavior among individuals with bipolar disorder [BD],” researchers concluded after using “Swedish national register data to follow 51,535 individuals with bipolar disorder from 2005 to 2013 for treatment with lithium and valproate,” then tracking the number of “suicide-related events.” The findings were published online June 9 in the American Journal of Psychiatry, a publication of the American Psychiatric Association.

Related Links:

— “Lithium superior to valproate for suicide in bipolar disorder,” Song J, et al., Healio, June 30, 2017.

On the front of its Real Estate section, the New York Times (7/2, RE1, Laterman, Subscription Publication) reported in a 1,900-word article that it appears compulsive hoarding “may be more widespread than previously believed, and that dealing with hoarders requires not just caution and care but special expertise.” For this reason, “many building managers and co-op boards confronted with this problem are now turning to clinicians for help.”

The Times pointed out, “The American Psychiatric Association estimates that 2 to 5 percent of the population could be classified as compulsive hoarders.” The Times added, “Once a subcategory of obsessive-compulsive disorder, hoarding received its own designation in the 2013 Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, the go-to reference book for mental health professionals published annually by the” APA.

Related Links:

— “Helping Those Who Hoard,” KAYA LATERMAN, New York Times, June 30, 2017.