New pub out today on public attitudes towards expanding community-based and peer-led MH services versus involuntary interventions

Takeaway: strong bipartisan support for expansions in voluntary services, with lower support for expanding forced interventions Takeaway

Private Equity Among US Psychiatric Hospitals This study describes trends in private equity ownership of psychiatric hospitals from 2013 through 2021 and the cross-sectional association between private equity ownership and hospital staffing and q...

Sharing our recent pub out today in JAMA Psychiatry looking at trends in private equity investment in psychiatric hospitals and its association with geography, staffing, utilization, quality performance, and other characteristics.

jamanetwork.com/journals/jam...

YouTube video by WashU School of Public Health Public Health Ideas with Morgan Shields

A conversation with Morgan Shields, PhD, an assistant professor at the Brown School and the new Dean of the School of Public Health at #WashU discussing two papers she co-authored on patient-centered inpatient psychiatry
youtu.be/bAhsoyxMG9s?...

71. Inpatient Psychiatric Care Exposed: Are We Healing Or Hurting Patients? w/ Dr. Morgan Shields Global Health Pursuit · Episode

It is also on Spotify and Apple Music: open.spotify.com/episode/1IDh...

YouTube video by Global Health Pursuit with Hetal Baman Inpatient Psychiatric Care Exposed: Are We Healing Or Hurting Patients?

It was a pleasure speaking with Hetal for the Global Health Pursuit podcast about my work.

This will be published in two parts. The first part focuses on some of my lived experiences and motivation and the second part will focus on my research.

youtu.be/sg0moq1aLjQ

MEDICAID Basics
Over 50% of the spending for Medicaid goes to cover those with DISABILITIES and the AGED

38% of those on Medicaid are CHILDREN. /1

Odd having to self promote as the world burns…AND my research IS advocacy.

Here is a new piece entitled “If you’re asking for my diversity, you’re asking for all of me”: Challenging experiences of neurodivergent higher education faculty in the United States.

psycnet.apa.org/record/2025-...

For those who want to know more about what happens when a large percentage of a state's adult population loses #Medicaid enrollment all of a sudden, go read about #TennCare disenrollment:

#HealthPolicy

scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=e...

Time for America To Get Over Our Ivy League Obsession | Opinion Schools like Harvard, Yale, and UPenn have long served as finishing schools for the wealthiest and the whitest of the old-money American elite.

From an op-ed I wrote for Newsweek on the role elite schools played in creating people like Vance by promoting the meritocracy myth.

www.newsweek.com/time-america...

We are well, all things considering!

Heidi, I hope you are doing well! Congrats on your JAMA paper

Demographics: 2018 Modal Participant Institution • Public University (70%) • Very High Research (VHR) Institution (84%) • >$500M Research Expenditures, w/ Medical School (31%) Participant • White, Male, Full Professor, average = 52 years old • 1-3 federal grants with <$500K in annual direct costs • Funding from NIH (47%) and/or NSF (33%) • In Bio/Biomed/Clin Sciences (40%) [or Phys/Math/Engin (28%)]

Percent "time taken away from active research" = "Percentage of research time associated with obtaining and managing federally-funded research, rather than actively conducting the research." It was 42.3% in 2005 (reported in 2007?).

Time taken away from research was unchanged from 2005 to 2012, but increased to 44.3% by 2018 (reported in 2019 and 2020).

Your Work and Research: Summary • Since 2012, the average estimated time taken away from research by pre-award and post-award requirements related to federally-funded research has increased from 42.3% to 44.3%. • The increase appears to predominantly affect the amount of time spent preparing proposals and interim/final research reports. • Although an estimated 39% of the time spent on proposal preparation may contribute to a PI’s scholarship, 50% or more of proposal preparation time is a complete waste due to rejections.

For those looking for the primary source of the studies about — among other things — the 44.3% admin. burden of externally funded research: thefdp.org/demonstratio...
- reports & slide decks
- data from 2005, 2012, 2018

(These data show *many* more results — more valuable than the PNAS paper, IMO.)

"A study of federally funded research projects in the United States estimated that principal investigators spend on average about 45% of their time on administrative activities related to applying for and managing projects rather than conducting active research"

www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

So I'm not surprised this is happening, but I'm waiting to see what the order actually says before drawing conclusions.

If you'd like to learn more about how conversion therapy is still happening, the Trevor Project has been tracking providers for years: www.thetrevorproject.org/wp-content/u...

Look what my wife made me 🥰

SCOTUS’s 1999 Olmstead v. L.C. decision found that "unnecessary institutional segregation" of people with disabilities violates the ADA. Here's my essay w/ Michael Stein and Lisa Iezzoni at Harvard Law Review Blog on what the last term meant for the Olmstead integration mandate: shorturl.at/1uVro.

This is very informative — thank you for writing it!

Drugmakers Paid PBMs Not to Restrict Opioid Prescriptions Drugmakers including Purdue Pharma paid pharmacy benefit managers not to restrict painkiller prescriptions, a New York Times investigation found.

Pharmacy benefit managers play a significant role in drug utilization — nice overview of PBMs with a cameo of my friend Andrew

www.nytimes.com/2024/12/17/b...

Institutional Betrayal in Inpatient Psychiatry: Effects on Trust and Engagement With Care | Psychiatric Services Objective: Patients’ experiences of inpatient psychiatry have received limited empirical scrutiny. The authors examined patients’ likelihood of experiencing institutional betrayal (harmful actions or ...

Alicia Lewis, Hyein S. Lee, Sasha Zabelski, and Morgan Shields, recently published "Institutional Betrayal in Inpatient Psychiatry: Effects on Trust and Engagement With Care."
@morgancshields.bsky.social

psychiatryonline.org/doi/10.1176/...

Opinion | What the Shooting of the UnitedHealthcare C.E.O. Can’t Tell Us If only fixing it were as easy as finding someone to blame.

www.nytimes.com/2024/12/13/o...

Perhaps you might disagree w the value-orientation of one’s work, but it is silly and intellectually dishonest to dismiss the empiricism of such work simply because you disagree w the value orientation.

So often we conflate these concepts and it becomes hard to have good-faith conversations. I’m also convinced certain people willfully denigrate the notion of values in order to uphold the status quo values, which enjoy covert status

“What is the effect of intervention x on reducing y symptoms of z condition.”

The most obvious value expressed here is symptoms = bad. We might argue that there is variation in who values that & under what conditions. But, that doesn’t *necessarily* diminish empirical learning.

It is misguided to denigrate ideology in “science” or research. In social science research, almost always we are guided by values. Values (self, societal) often guide variable selection & research questions (eg professional treatment guidelines).

I am also skeptical of “evidence-based policy.” The idea is often predicated on indifference to the reality that the production and use of evidence is endogenous to political processes. Evidence is important. But it is fundamentally political. So, whether & how it gets used is a matter of power.

Trump Doesn’t Need Congress To Make Abortion Effectively Unavailable - KFF Health News President-elect Donald Trump vowed on the campaign trail not to sign a nationwide abortion ban. But he wouldn’t need to do so to make abortion difficult, or illegal, writes KFF Health News’ chief Wash...

kffhealthnews.org/news/article...

I’ve seen several social media personalities actually parlay their veneer of legitimacy into actual academic opportunities and formal signals of legitimacy and it is concerning. It really is concerning what is happening w our collective pursuit of knowledge & “truth”

This connects to my concern over valuing “impact.” I value impact, too — yes. But unfortunately there are now incentives to get broad attention & to contribute to polarized discourse in a way that is provocative

We need scholars & thinkers to be motivated by the pursuit of knowledge, not fame

Your purpose on earth is not to argue with people who intentionally want to misunderstand you

The irony is that the behaviors are oriented around defending the status quo, essentially. But the behaviors also make the status quo look like a guilty bully.