Latest news with #NationalHealthServiceCorps
Yahoo
08-02-2025
- Health
- Yahoo
Sen. Tina Smith: Providing hope for Minnesotans with mental health issues (copy)
I've learned the lessons of depression the hard way. It's something I experienced first in my late teens and then again in my 30s. Depression makes you feel so hopeless that you can't even see hope on the horizon. You can't feel joy or love or contentment, and you can't see a way you'll ever feel that way again. And at that point, what's the point? The worst part about depression is how treacherously it saps your capacity to function. Treacherous because depression can feel like a personal weakness rather than what it is: a malfunction of our brain. First, I want to say that if you or someone you know is feeling this way, there's help, and you deserve help. Each county in Minnesota has mental health resources available. In Scott County, call 952-818-3702. The National Suicide Prevention Lifeline is toll-free: 800-273-8255. Sometimes just getting up the courage to ask for help can be difficult. I was struck by the bravery of a Lake City woman who has been a dairy farmer for 33 years. With year after year of terrible markets putting her family's financial future on the ropes, she felt hopeless. But after taking the chance to reach out to a counselor, she is speaking out publicly so more people understand that, while seeking help won't raise dairy prices, it can raise awareness that there's help for mental health issues. In my 30s, when my psychologist suggested that I take a diagnostic test and then informed me that I clearly was suffering from depression, I rejected her diagnosis. What's wrong with me is me, I thought. But I listened. And thank God for her. I honestly don't know where I would be if not for her empathy but most of all her medical and professional expertise, which helped me get better. I know how blessed I am to have had early help. Everyone should have the same access to mental health care, regardless of our insurance, our zip code or our age. Yet too many people can't get the help they need. Recently, at schools in St. Paul and Rochester, I highlighted what thousands of Minnesota families and educators know to be a pressing need: expanding mental health services in our schools. I also discussed the growing understanding by Minnesotans – of all ages – that problems like depression, stress and anxiety can upend anyone's life and need to be addressed. We are making progress. Last year, I worked with Republican Sen. Lisa Murkowski to pass a law to bring mental health professionals from the National Health Service Corps into schools and community-based organizations. And we need to do more. My bill to bring comprehensive mental health services to schools in Minnesota and across the country would expand access to care and help reduce the stigma that surrounds mental health care. We need to get it passed. And as we take up the Older Americans Act this year, I'll focus on what we can do to help older adults deal with the social isolation they feel in their later years. Minnesota senators have long worked to help the millions of Americans who suffer mental health issues, and I'm determined to carry on this work. Sen. Paul Wellstone was the first to champion mental health parity – the fundamental value that insurance coverage for mental health should be just like coverage for any other medical service. After Paul's death, Sen. Al Franken worked with Paul's son David to write the final rules for the law Paul pushed for. Their work put us on the path toward true mental health parity, but we still have work to do to finish the job and to ensure all Minnesotans and all Americans have complete coverage for mental health services. So I ask you to join with me. Speak out. If you or someone you love are struggling with mental health challenges, don't let anything get in the way of getting help any more than you would resist getting help if you had the flu or a broken arm. My experience showed me how important getting help can be. Just as clearly as I remember the shock of my diagnosis, I also remember the sensation of slowly emerging from depression: a little more energy every day. A little more capacity to pay attention to the people and things I love. The colors of the world came back.
New York Times
28-01-2025
- Health
- New York Times
Hawaii Governor, a Doctor, Blames Kennedy for Measles Deaths in Samoa
It was a spasm of tragedy on a remote Pacific island that only a few months later was overshadowed by a global pandemic. But to Gov. Josh Green of Hawaii, the measles outbreak on neighboring Samoa that killed 83 people, mostly babies and children, was a preventable catastrophe wrought by the man President Trump now wants to steer American health policy. In December of 2019 Dr. Green, an emergency medical physician and Hawaii's Democratic lieutenant governor at the time, rounded up a medical team and thousands of vaccine doses and flew to Samoa to help. Last month he flew to Washington aiming to alert lawmakers from both parties about the role Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Mr. Trump's nominee for health and human services secretary and a longtime vaccine skeptic, played in the Samoa outbreak. Mr. Kennedy's confirmation hearings are on Wednesday and Thursday before two Senate committees, which will then vote on whether his nomination advances to the full Senate. Democrats are attempting to leverage Mr. Kennedy's connection to the Samoa outbreak to build opposition to his nomination. Dr. Green recently appeared in an ad by a liberal advocacy group, 314 Action, saying, 'R.F.K. Jr. had spread so much misinformation that the country stopped vaccinating, and that caused a tragic and fatal spread of the measles.' In an interview on Monday, Dr. Green said that based on his conversations so far, if the full Senate vote was taken anonymously, 'R.F.K. Jr. would be defeated 70-30 or worse.' At the same time, he said, 'the political climate has everyone under great pressure to go with the president, or be labeled disloyal.' A spokeswoman for Mr. Kennedy did not respond to requests for comment on Tuesday. In the past he has blamed Samoa's measles outbreak on 'an Indian-manufactured MMR vaccine,' referring to the measles, mumps and rubella vaccine. Dr. Green, 54, arrived in Hawaii in 2000 as a young physician with the National Health Service Corps, and was often the only doctor serving small rural communities on Hawaii's Big Island. After he was elected to the state legislature in 2012, he cared for patients on weekends. He was barred from outside employment after he was elected governor in 2022, but he says he volunteers as a 'street medicine' practitioner offering health care to unsheltered veterans and other people in need. Samoa's outbreak had its roots in a tragic error. In 2018, nurses preparing MMR vaccines mixed the doses with a muscle relaxant instead of water. The tainted shots caused the deaths of two infants and ratcheted up parents' fears about the safety of vaccines. Vaccination skeptics often wrongly link childhood vaccines to autism, and after the incident Samoa's prime minister, whose grandson happens to have autism, halted the island nation's vaccination program. As a result of the deaths and the ban, fewer than one-third of Samoa's 1-year-olds received the MMR vaccine in 2018, down from as high as 90 percent in 2013, according to the World Health Organization. Infections began to surge. Children's Health Defense — a group led by Mr. Kennedy that in 2022 was banned for a time from Facebook and Instagram for what the platforms said was the spread of medical misinformation — posted news of the prime minister's decision to stop the vaccine program on its website. Both Mr. Kennedy and his friend Del Bigtree, who is also skeptical of vaccines, have large, international online followings, and they used the two babies' deaths to underscore their message about the dangers of vaccines. Mr. Bigtree later served as communications chief for Mr. Kennedy's presidential campaign. As an American with a famous name and a powerful network that had amplified parents' fears in Samoa, Mr. Kennedy 'preyed on people that were vulnerable,' Dr. Green said. In June of 2019, Mr. Kennedy and his wife, the actress Cheryl Hines, traveled to Samoa at the invitation of the prime minister, who treated the couple like visiting royalty. 'My husband wants to move here,' a laughing Ms. Hines told reporters during the trip. During the visit Mr. Kennedy posed for a photo with Edwin Tamasese, a coconut farmer whom he has called a 'medical freedom hero.' Mr. Kennedy later wrote on the Children's Health Defense website that the trip had been arranged by Mr. Tamasese, who was arrested months later for spreading vaccine misinformation and promoting ineffective measles treatments like vitamins and papaya leaf extract. Mr. Kennedy also said on the website that he visited Samoa because health officials and the prime minister 'were curious to measure health outcomes following the 'natural experiment' created by the national respite from vaccines.' Mr. Kennedy said he was offering them help in creating a tracking system. He later denied that he had been in Samoa to push his views on vaccines. In a 2021 interview for 'Shot in the Arm,' a documentary about vaccine hesitancy and the Covid-19 pandemic, Mr. Kennedy told the filmmaker, Scott Hamilton Kennedy, who is no relation, that 'I didn't go to Samoa, by the way, for anything to do with that issue.') Measles are highly contagious, and by late 2019, the number of new infections in Samoa was doubling each week. The first child died on Oct. 13. A month later, with 16 people dead from measles complications, the government declared a national emergency and made MMR shots mandatory. Four days after that, Mr. Kennedy sent a letter to Samoa's prime minister urging the Samoan health ministry to 'determine, scientifically, if the outbreak was caused by inadequate vaccine coverage or alternatively, by a defective vaccine.' In early December, with over 3,700 new cases and more than 50 dead, Samoa's communications minister said anti-vaccination conspiracy theorists were 'slowing us down' in the effort to vaccinate people. Dr. Green contacted Samoa's health minister, Faimalotoa Kika Stowers. Could he bring a team on a vaccination mission? Ms. Stowers relayed his offer to the prime minister, who in the face of the growing death toll 'offered to shut down the country' to help the Hawaii team work, Dr. Green recalled in an interview. Within 48 hours Dr. Green secured volunteers, air travel from donors and 50,000 doses of vaccine from UNICEF. His team landed in Samoa at 5:30 a.m. on Dec. 4 and with several hundred Samoan volunteers fanned into the countryside. Residents hung red flags or scraps of cloth outside their homes if they needed vaccine. Dr. Green recalled visiting a home where a child had died so recently that her skin was still flushed with fever. 'I felt the warmth leaving a child's body after she died in a preventable measles outbreak,' he said. Global public health experts have said several factors, including a slow government response and Samoans' limited access to health care, contributed to the outbreak. But the World Health Organization has directly linked vaccine misinformation to the spread.
New York Times
28-01-2025
- New York Times
Trumpism Took My Father From Me. I Think I Can Get Him Back.
When I was a teenager, my Puerto Rican mother forbade me to cross the border into Mexico, my father's country. 'Mexico is nothing but trouble,' she said. The border city of Tijuana, a short drive from our house in San Diego, was seeing a surge in cartel violence fueled by U.S. drug demand and U.S. firearms flowing illegally into Mexico despite that country's strict gun laws. It was the early 2000s, and American newscasters framed it as a Mexican problem. After my parents split up, my mother sometimes did too. It was her way of grieving my father, who had started binge drinking and doing drugs, depressed and angry that she was out-earning him as a National Health Service Corps physician after he lost his job at a meatpacker. She wanted to draw a hard boundary severing me from everything he represented. But I didn't want to be ruptured. I wanted to be whole. For years, our family had driven south across the port of entry to eat seafood and explore. I missed those trips, which had ended when I was 6. So on weekends, I rode the trolley to the port of entry and walked through the rotating metal gates. There were no border guards for southbound travelers, so I crossed undetected. In Tijuana, I drank tequila, rode mechanical bulls and danced with strangers. I was 17, but nobody asked for my ID. At a house party, I met a cute local boy who offered me his bedroom because I was too intoxicated to find my way back to the border. We slept fully clothed and made chocolate chip pancakes in the morning. A part of me was seeking trouble, but I never found it. During these clandestine trips, I was trying to form a fuller understanding of who I was. I don't think I strongly identified as a 'Latina.' I sometimes said I was 'Hispanic,' the more common term then. But even that felt ill fitting, like a very small coat. More often I called myself 'Mexican and Puerto Rican.' I knew that Latinos were divided among themselves, too contradictory to be bound by a single label. My mother told me that when she was pregnant with me, my father's cousins campaigned against his relationship with a 'gringa.' (Puerto Ricans are U.S. citizens.) And whenever I misbehaved as a child, my Puerto Rican grandmother blamed the Mexican in me: 'That's her father's blood coursing through her veins.' I recall reading Walt Whitman's 'Song of Myself' and filling the margins with hearts and exclamation points. His words elated me. 'To be in any form, what is that?' he asked. He wrote that 'I contain multitudes.' 'I too am untranslatable,' he proclaimed. As a child of the border, I related. I knew many labels applied to me — girl, American, Hispanic, millennial, gringa — but I liked to think of myself as untranslatable, or too complex to be reduced to any of them. Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times. Thank you for your patience while we verify access. Already a subscriber? Log in. Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
