Harold Pollack

Yet another attempt to share our piece on neuropsychiatric disorders among emergency department patients with intellectual and developmental disorders..... I"m struck by the prevalent early-onset dementia among patients w/Down syndrome. This graph speaks for itself.… link.growkudos.com/1f3s851ezgg

Medicaid Cuts Will Heighten the US Mental Health and Substance Use Crisis | Milbank Memorial Fund The One Big Beautiful Bill Act's cuts to Medicaid will heighten the nation’s behavioral health crisis. Nationally, each year an estimated 20 to 25% of children and adults have a mental illness1 and 17...

Beth McGinty and Magdalena Cerda in Milbank Quarterly-- Medicaid Cuts Will Heighten the US Mental Health and Substance Use Crisis www.milbank.org/quarterly/op...

Went to a real gym for the first time in a long while. I turned out to be rusty and complacent in the sparring and physical combat dept. Came away with some impressive bruises in various places from hard contact and a dramatic taikedown. I had just forgotten how tough those treadmills can be .

80 Years Ago, A Jewish Radical and Two Negro League Stars Led a Crusade to Integrate Baseball That Paved the Way for Jackie Robinson | Common Dreams The little known story about Sam Nahem, Leon Day, and Willard Brown who in 1945 played on a field in the shadow of Adolph Hitler's Nazi Germany and broke down historic barriers.

80 Years Ago, A Jewish Radical and Two Negro League Stars Led a Crusade to Integrate Baseball That Paved the Way for Jackie Robinson www.commondreams.org/opinion/80-y...

Boo!

All articles are freely available now, so check them out. There's still time to add them to your fall syllabi!

Finally there are two book reviews that are especially timely: Ann Keller's review of Pamuk's "Politics and Expertise: How to Use Science in a Democratic Society" and Robert Ostergard's review of Dahl's "The COVID-19 Intelligence Failure: Why Warning Was Not Enough"

In the Tracking Health Reform section, Gusmano and Thompson analyze the Biden administration's efforts to minimize losses of Medicaid enrollment during the "great unwinding". read.dukeupress.edu/jhppl/articl...

Analyzing Public Support for School-Based Mental Health Services Abstract. Context: Public schools play a central role in addressing the mental health crisis among American youth, but most schools are limited in the services they provide. As of 2019, 44% of adminis...

Last, Hemauer and Warner examine the dynamics of public support for school-based mental health services, an increasingly critical point of access. They offer recommendations for policymakers and local school administrators based on the public opinion findings. read.dukeupress.edu/jhppl/articl...

Next, Sprague et al. also examine state policy, looking at variation across state-level paid leave policies to assess inequities in access and coverage of these policies in the absence of a federal policy. read.dukeupress.edu/jhppl/articl...

The next article, by Erickson and Meyer-Gutbrod, examines the interactions between news attention to opioids, overdose rates, and state-level political attention to opioids mortality. read.dukeupress.edu/jhppl/articl...

The first article by Gudiksen et al. is a qualitative study examining employers' and insurers' perspectives about hospital consolidation. read.dukeupress.edu/jhppl/articl...

New issue of @jhppl.bsky.social just dropped (Volume 50, Issue 5). Check it out, for a set of wonderful articles on topics that span health care, opioids, paid leave, and mental health, a great representation of the diversity in JHPPL. Thread here:

A new editorial in @addictionjournal.bsky.social warns that US state and insurance provider policies are limiting patient access to higher doses of buprenorphine, one of the main medical treatments for opioid use disorders: doi.org/10.1111/add.... | DOI: 10.1111/add.70127
@haroldpollack.bsky.social

Someone asked for my 4 fave aphorisms in English prose:
1. Hurt people hurt people
2. Where your treasure is, your heart will be there also
3. Watch the way he treated his last girlfriend. That's the way he'll treat you
4. If you sit down at the poker table and don't know who the sucker is--you do

Removing arbitrary limitations on Buprenorphine is one piece of the puzzle in addressing the opioid epidemic. Nicole Gastala, Brianna Hudak, Mai T. Pho, Katharine Wilcox, and I in Addiction. onlinelibrary.wiley.com/share/A6UWCB...

“This is one more basic test for the media. Are they going to focus on the pretextual attacks to discredit Cook —the mortgage allegations, or her qualifications — or will they recognize the pattern of a government using its powers to crush any independent sources of power?” *obviously racist attacks

My all-purpose AI reform is banning computers from pretending they are human. Having names, saying "I," pretending to have feelings, representing what they emit as "advice," etc. That's where much of the mischief starts.

Thanks, Stacie. Such stories are sadly common, and so often overlooked.

This gift link should work. Losing a friend. Older men have the highest suicide rate of any demographic group. This challenge doesn't get nearly the attention it should.
www.chicagotribune.com/2025/08/13/o...

Thanks, E.J. We are overdue for connecting

I am a public health researcher

Indeed. Thank you.

No--complete amateur.

Harold Pollack: I studied the high male suicide rate. Then I lost my friend to it. We middle-aged and older men face higher suicide rates than are found among our teenage sons and grandsons, or among women at any age.

Losing a friend. Older men have the highest suicide rate of any demographic group. This challenge doesn't get nearly the attention it should. www.chicagotribune.com/2025/08/13/o...

Sony alpha 7

Andrew Goodman-Bacon is a terrific lecturer. That is the post.

yup

I cleaned the sensor on my camera. Wow--what a noticeable difference on these zoomed-in pictures... Great return on 10 minutes of effort.

Senate Confirms Jeanine Pirro as U.S. Attorney for D.C.

Trapped in an over-written Philip Roth novel--Chapter 68: "Senate confirms Jeanine Pirro as U.S. Attorney for DC." www.nytimes.com/2025/08/03/u...