(5/5)

🚨 It’s time to flood the zone.

NIH scientists just took a huge risk speaking out. Now it’s our turn.

📜 Read the Bethesda Declaration
✍️ Sign the Public Letter of Support
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Read and sign here 👉 www.standupforscience.net/bethesda-dec...

+1000 🫠

Agreed, the system is indeed broken. That's why improving access to *effective* treatment is what matters - not access to just anything!

Key takeaway - requiring parental consent may be a major barrier to tx access for many teens w/ depression. 1 solution=ensuring safe onramps to effective MH tx for teens whose parent(s) are unable/unwilling to consent. Another=increased MH literacy training for parents. Multi-pronged approach!

The 'unlicensed' therapists would not be covered under these laws anyway - so I agree that protections against harms are essential, but I think it's a separate issue than state laws requiring consent for formal treatment with licensed therapists!

5/ To complement our paper, we've created an interactive dashboard on state policies and rates of treatment access among teens with past-year depression: www.schleiderlab.org/dashboard.html

4/ Even the most scalable interventions are powerless if adolescents are legally disempowered from using them. It is an ethical imperative to create safe, barrier-free pathways for teens to independently access potentially life-saving mental health supports.

3/ Specifically: In states that always prohibited independent adolescent consent, only 37.23% of adolescents with a past-year depressive episode received any treatment in 2021-2022, versus 46.69% in states allowing adolescents to consent with no or limited stipulations.

2/ One third of U.S. states have laws that prevent adolescents from consenting to mental health treatment independently. We found that treatment use among adolescents with a past-year major depressive episode was significantly lower in states mandating caregiver consent.

I struggle to think of any compelling evidence that longer therapies are consistently superior to briefer ones...we tried to summarize in this paper: pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC...

"Talking to a friend" would be a neat control! Not much work there outside "peer support" which feels different.

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