As the Trump administration threatens to strip accrediting bodies of their power, many are scrambling to purge diversity requirements.The American Psychological Association, which sets standards for professional training in mental health, has voted to suspend its requirement that postgraduate programs show a commitment to diversity in recruitment and hiring.The decision comes as accrediting bodies throughout higher education scramble to respond to the executive order signed by President Trump attacking diversity, equity and inclusion policies. It pauses a drive to broaden the profession of psychology, which is disproportionately white and female, at a time of rising distress among young Americans.The A.P.A. is the chief accrediting body for professional training in psychology, and the only one recognized by the U.S. Department of Education. It provides accreditation to around 1,300 training programs, including doctoral internships and postdoctoral residencies.Mr. Trump has made accrediting bodies a particular target in his crusade against D.E.I. programs, threatening in one campaign video to “fire the radical Left accreditors that have allowed our colleges to become dominated by Marxist maniacs and lunatics” and “accept applications for new accreditors.”Department of Justice officials have pressured accrediting bodies in recent weeks, warning the American Bar Association in a letter that it might lose its status unless it repealed diversity mandates. The A.B.A. voted in late February to suspend its diversity and inclusion standard for law schools.The concession by the A.P.A., a bastion of support for diversity programming, is a particular landmark. The association has made combating racism a central focus of its work in recent years, and in 2021 adopted a resolution apologizing for its role in perpetuating racism by, among other things, promulgating eugenic theories.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.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.

On a recent Friday morning, Daniel, a lawyer in his early 40s, was in a Zoom counseling session describing tapering off lithium. Earlier that week he had awakened with racing thoughts, so anxious that he could not read, and he counted the hours before sunrise.At those moments, Daniel doubted his decision to wean off the cocktail of psychiatric medications which had been part of his life since his senior year in high school, when he was diagnosed with bipolar disorder.Was this his body adjusting to the lower dosage? Was it a reaction to the taco seasoning he had eaten the night before? Or was it what his psychiatrist would have called it: a relapse?“It still does go to the place of — what if the doctors are right?” said Daniel.On his screen, Laura Delano nodded sympathetically.Ms. Delano is not a doctor; her main qualification, she likes to say, is having been “a professional psychiatric patient between the ages of 13 and 27.” During those years, when she attended Harvard and was a nationally ranked squash player, she was prescribed 19 psychiatric medications, often in combinations of three or four at a time.Then Ms. Delano decided to walk away from psychiatric care altogether, a journey she detailed in a new memoir, “Unshrunk: A Story of Psychiatric Treatment Resistance.” Fourteen years after taking her last psychotropic drug, Ms. Delano projects a radiant good health that also serves as her argument — living proof that, all along, her psychiatrists were wrong.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.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.

Federal regulators will no longer require patients to provide blood tests before receiving the drug from pharmacies.The Food and Drug Administration has taken a crucial step toward expanding access to the antipsychotic medication clozapine, the only drug approved for treatment-resistant schizophrenia, among the most devastating of mental illnesses.The agency announced on Monday that it was eliminating a requirement that patients submit blood tests before their prescriptions can be filled.Clozapine, which was approved in 1989, is regarded by many physicians as the most effective available treatment for schizophrenia, and research shows that the drug significantly reduces suicidal behavior. Clozapine is also associated with a rare side effect called neutropenia, a drop in white blood cell counts that, in its most severe form, can be life-threatening.In 2015, federal regulators imposed a regimen known as risk evaluation and mitigation strategies, or REMS, that required patients to submit to weekly, biweekly and monthly blood tests that had to be uploaded onto a database and verified by pharmacists.Physicians have long complained that, as a result, clozapine is grossly underutilized.Dr. Frederick C. Nucifora, director of the Adult Schizophrenia Clinic at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, said he believed that around 30 percent of patients with schizophrenia would benefit from clozapine — far more than the 4 percent who currently take it.“I have had many patients who were doing terribly, who struggled to function outside the hospital, and cycled through many medications,” he said. “If they go on clozapine, they really tend to not be hospitalized again. I’ve had people go on to finish college and work. It’s quite remarkable.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.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.

The nation’s largest association of psychologists this month warned federal regulators that A.I. chatbots “masquerading” as therapists, but programmed to reinforce, rather than to challenge, a user’s thinking, could drive vulnerable people to harm themselves or others.In a presentation to a Federal Trade Commission panel, Arthur C. Evans Jr., the chief executive of the American Psychological Association, cited court cases involving two teenagers who had consulted with “psychologists” on Character.AI, an app that allows users to create fictional A.I. characters or chat with characters created by others.In one case, a 14-year-old boy in Florida died by suicide after interacting with a character claiming to be a licensed therapist. In another, a 17-year-old boy with autism in Texas grew hostile and violent toward his parents during a period when he corresponded with a chatbot that claimed to be a psychologist. Both boys’ parents have filed lawsuits against the company.Dr. Evans said he was alarmed at the responses offered by the chatbots. The bots, he said, failed to challenge users’ beliefs even when they became dangerous; on the contrary, they encouraged them. If given by a human therapist, he added, those answers could have resulted in the loss of a license to practice, or civil or criminal liability. “They are actually using algorithms that are antithetical to what a trained clinician would do,” he said. “Our concern is that more and more people are going to be harmed. People are going to be misled, and will misunderstand what good psychological care is.”He said the A.P.A. had been prompted to action, in part, by how realistic A.I. chatbots had become. “Maybe, 10 years ago, it would have been obvious that you were interacting with something that was not a person, but today, it’s not so obvious,” he said. “So I think that the stakes are much higher now.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.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.

A large study found that men lost seven years of life expectancy and women lost nine years, compared with counterparts without the disorder.A study of more than 30,000 British adults diagnosed with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, or A.D.H.D., found that, on average, they were dying earlier than their counterparts in the general population — around seven years earlier for men, and around nine for women.The study, which was published Thursday in The British Journal of Psychiatry, is believed to be the first to use all-cause mortality data to estimate life expectancy in people with A.D.H.D. Previous studies have pointed to an array of risks associated with the condition, among them poverty, mental health disorders, smoking and substance abuse.The authors cautioned that A.D.H.D. is substantially underdiagnosed and that the people in their study — most of them diagnosed as young adults — might be among the more severely affected. Still, they described their findings as “extremely concerning,” highlighting unmet needs that “require urgent attention.”“It’s a big number, and it is worrying,” said Joshua Stott, a professor of aging and clinical psychology at University College London and an author of the study. “I see it as likely to be more about health inequality than anything else. But it’s quite a big health inequality.”The study did not identify causes of early death among people with A.D.H.D. but found that they were twice as likely as the general population to smoke or abuse alcohol and that they had far higher rates of autism, self-harming behaviors and personality disorders than the general population. In adulthood, Dr. Stott said, “they find it harder to manage impulses, and have more risky behaviors.”He said health care systems might need to adjust in order to better serve people with A.D.H.D., who may have sensory sensitivity or difficulty managing time or communicating with clinicians during brief appointments. He said he hoped treatments for substance abuse or depression could be adapted for patients with A.D.H.D.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.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.

Digital mental health platforms were supposed to expand access for the neediest patients. Researchers say that hasn’t happened.The number of Americans receiving psychotherapy increased by 30 percent during the pandemic, as virtual sessions replaced in-person appointments — but new research dampens the hope that technology will make mental health care more available to the neediest populations.In fact, the researchers found, the shift to teletherapy has exacerbated existing disparities.The increase in psychotherapy has occurred among groups that already enjoyed more access: people in higher-income brackets, living in cities, with steady employment and more education, researchers found in a series of studies, the most recent of which was, published Wednesday in The American Journal of Psychiatry.Among those who have not benefited from the boom, the team found, are children from low-income families, Black children and adolescents, and adults with “serious psychological distress.”“I think that the whole system of care — and maybe the internet delivery is a piece of this — appears to be pivoting away from those in greatest need,” said Dr. Mark Olfson, a professor of psychiatry at Columbia University Irving Medical Center and the lead author of the studies on access to care.“We’re seeing that those with the greatest distress are losing ground, in terms of their likelihood of being treated, and that to me is a very important and disconcerting trend,” he added.It wasn’t supposed to be this way. In the 1990s, teletherapy was championed as a way to reach disadvantaged patients living in remote locations where there were few psychiatrists. A decade later, it was presented as a more accessible alternative to face-to-face sessions, one that could radically lower barriers to care.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.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.

Concerned about anxiety and depression among students, some schools are monitoring what children type into their devices to detect suicidal thinking or self-harm.In response to the youth mental health crisis, many school districts are investing in software that monitors what students type on their school devices, alerting counselors if a child appears to be contemplating suicide or self-harm.Such tools — produced by companies like Gaggle, GoGuardian Beacon, Bark and Securly — can pick up what a child types into a Google search, or a school essay, or an email or text message to a friend. Some of these alerts may be false alarms, set off by innocuous research projects or offhand comments, but the most serious alerts may prompt calls to parents or even home visits by school staff members or law enforcement.I write about mental health for The New York Times, including the effects of social media use on children’s brains and algorithms that predict who is at risk for suicide. I’m interested in knowing more about how these monitoring tools are working in real life.If you are a student, parent, teacher or school administrator, I’d like to hear about your experiences. Do you think these tools have saved lives? Do they help students who are anxious or depressed get the care they need? Are you concerned about students’ privacy? Is there any cost to false positives?I will read each submission and may use your contact information to follow up with you. I will not publish any details you share without contacting you and verifying your information.If you are having thoughts of suicide, call or text 988 to reach the 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline or go to SpeakingOfSuicide.com/resources for a list of additional resources.Share Your Experiences with Suicide Prevention Software

Neuroimaging found girls experienced cortical thinning far faster than boys did during the first year of Covid lockdowns.A study of adolescent brain development that tested children before and after coronavirus pandemic lockdowns in the United States found that girls’ brains aged far faster than expected, something the researchers attributed to social isolation.The study from the University of Washington, published on Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, measured cortical thinning, a process that starts in either late childhood or early adolescence, as the brain begins to prune redundant synapses and shrink its outer layer.Thinning of the cortex is not necessarily bad; some scientists frame the process as the brain rewiring itself as it matures, increasing its efficiency. But the process is known to accelerate in stressful conditions, and accelerated thinning is correlated with depression and anxiety.Scans taken in 2021, after shutdowns started to lift, showed that both boys and girls had experienced rapid cortical thinning during that period. But the effect was far more notable in girls, whose thinning had accelerated, on average, by 4.2 years ahead of what was expected; the thinning in boys’ brains had accelerated 1.4 years ahead of what was expected.“That is a stunning difference,” said Patricia K. Kuhl, a director of the Institute for Learning and Brain Sciences at the University of Washington and one of the study’s authors. The results, she added, suggested that “a girl who came in at 11, and then returned to the lab at age 14, now has a brain that looks like an 18-year-old’s.”Dr. Kuhl attributed the change to “social deprivation caused by the pandemic,” which she suggested had hit adolescent girls harder because they are more dependent on social interaction — in particular, talking through problems with friends — as a way to release stress. We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.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.

Did Dr. Alok Kanojia’s livestreamed conversations with a troubled video game champion cross an ethical line?A few minutes into his first livestreamed conversation with Byron Bernstein, Dr. Alok Kanojia got his caveats out of the way. This was not a therapy session; this was just conversation. Colleagues had warned him, he explained, that blurring the line could get him sued.“I’m a psychiatrist,” he said, “but I can’t treat your depression over the internet.”“Yeah, gotcha,” Mr. Bernstein said.Dr. Kanojia’s fleece jacket bore the logo of Harvard Medical School, where he had done his medical residency. But he had also been a gamer who had followed Mr. Bernstein’s record-shattering career. He beamed at the younger man with undisguised admiration.“So tell me,” he said, clasping his hands together. “What are talking about today, buddy?”Mr. Bernstein, known in the gaming world as Reckful, tweaked the volume on his Twitch feed — thousands of viewers were waiting — and the two men plunged in.The next hour and 53 minutes were intense even by the standards of Twitch, the livestreaming platform where video gamers often field questions about every aspect of their lives. As reactions flooded in, Mr. Bernstein opened up about his older brother’s death by suicide. He spoke about his own suicide attempt, his terrible experience with lithium, the nights he fell asleep wishing he would not wake up.It was a riveting thing to watch: a fragile, brilliant young man opposite a probing, empathic doctor. The two men clearly liked each other, and Mr. Bernstein said he was improving. They had six conversations, with live audiences that climbed into the hundreds of thousands. Then, a few months later, the dialogue ended, tragically, with Mr. Bernstein’s death by suicide at 31.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.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.

A study of more than a million Danes found that frequent moves in childhood had a bigger effect than poverty on adult mental health risk.In recent decades, mental health providers began screening for “adverse childhood experiences” — generally defined as abuse, neglect, violence, family dissolution and poverty — as risk factors for later disorders.But what if other things are just as damaging?Researchers who conducted a large study of adults in Denmark, published on Wednesday in the journal JAMA Psychiatry, found something they had not expected: Adults who moved frequently in childhood have significantly more risk of suffering from depression than their counterparts who stayed put in a community.In fact, the risk of moving frequently in childhood was significantly greater than the risk of living in a poor neighborhood, said Clive Sabel, a professor at the University of Plymouth and the paper’s lead author.“Even if you came from the most income-deprived communities, not moving — being a ‘stayer’ — was protective for your health,” said Dr. Sabel, a geographer who studies the effect of environment on disease.“I’ll flip it around by saying, even if you come from a rich neighborhood, but you moved more than once, that your chances of depression were higher than if you hadn’t moved and come from the poorest quantile neighborhoods,” he added.The study, a collaboration by Aarhus University, the University of Manchester and the University of Plymouth, included all Danes born between 1982 and 2003, more than a million people. Of those, 35,098, or around 2.3 percent, received diagnoses of depression from a psychiatric hospital.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.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.