Good Day BIO: Mental Illness Awareness Week

This week (October 3-9) is Mental Illness Awareness Week—here’s why we need to destigmatize mental health care and where you can get help if you need it. 

1 in 5 U.S. adults experiences mental illness each year,according to the National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI). In addition, 1 in 20 U.S. adults experiences serious mental illness each year, while 1 in 6 young people in the U.S. (age 6-17) experience a mental health disorder each year. 

We also know that in a 12-month period, 50% of those with any mental health condition had two or more disorders, according to Mental Health America. 

Mental health has gotten worse during the pandemic.A recent Harvard study found 36% of respondents to a national survey reported feeling lonely “frequently” or “almost all the time or all the time” in the prior four weeks—a major increase from 25% who recalled experiencing loneliness in the two months prior to the start of the pandemic.

Health workers are feeling increased stress, with 58% of physicians reporting feeling burnout in 2020, a marked increase from 40% in 2018. 

With numbers like these, it’s important to destigmatize mental illness and the importance of receiving treatment. For example, 87% of emergency physicians felt increased stress in 2020, but nearly half of them are not comfortable seeking mental health treatment. 

Throughout the week, Mental Health America is bringing awareness to a single mental illness each day and releasing new fact sheets, and holding webinars for people to learn more.  

For more information about Mental Illness Awareness Week, visit Mental Health America's Mental Illness Awareness Week web hub. 

Listen: The pandemic has unleashed overwhelming levels of fear, isolation, anxiety and loss in our society. On an episode of the I am BIO Podcast last year, we discussed America’s mental health crisis and the emergence of tools like telepsychiatry to help address it—listen here.

Do you have questions or need support? Call the NAMI Helpline at 800-950-NAMI. In a crisis, text "NAMI" to 741741.

More Health Care News:

WHO: WHO recommends groundbreaking malaria vaccine for children at risk
“Malaria remains a primary cause of childhood illness and death in sub-Saharan Africa. More than 260,000 African children under the age of five die from malaria annually.”

And biotechnology can help us get there. 

Climate change is obviously bad for the environment—but it’s bad for business, too,explains a recent paper from the European Central Bank. 

How bad? “[F]or corporates and banks most exposed to climate risks, the impact is potentially very significant, especially in the absence of further mitigating policies,” says the paper. “If climate risks are not reduced, the costs to companies arising from extreme weather events would rise substantially, and significantly and negatively affect their creditworthiness.” 

“The short-term costs of the transition pale in comparison to the costs of unfettered climate change in the medium to long term,” the paper continues. 

Specifically, climate change could shrink Europe’s economy “by 10 percent if no new policies to mitigate climate change are introduced,” explained The New York Times. “By comparison, the costs of transition would be no more than 2 percent of gross domestic product.”

Luckily, many low-carbon technologies are already available—from replacing fossil-fuel-based plastics with biodegradable plant-based materials, to agricultural innovations helping plants capture more carbon and reducing methane emissions from livestock, to low-carbon aviation fuels, which are already taking off. 

Now, we need to deploy them more widely—and policy has a big role to play. We need climate-smart policy to drive investment in these tools, such as the Growing Climate Solutions Act and low-carbon fuel standards, as well as trade policy that allows innovation to thrive.

José M. Hernándezgrew up in a migrant farming family from Mexico—and became a NASA astronaut. After developing quantitative x-ray film imaging analysis techniques, he co-developed the first full-fledged digital mammography imaging system. This technology has been effective in detecting breast cancer earlier than other film/screen mammography techniques.

Meet more Hispanic and Latinx scientists and innovators you should know.

President Biden’s Thursday: Traveling to Chicago to visit a Clayco construction site and talk about COVID-19 vaccine mandates. 

What’s Happening on Capitol Hill: We seem to have a deal on the debt limit—here’s more from Roll Call. Meanwhile, the House Agriculture Committee will hold a hearing on the state of the livestock industry featuring U.S. Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack, and the Senate Commerce, Science, and Transportation Subcommittee on Communications, Media, and Broadband will look at how to expand access to telehealth.