(10-1-21) Exciting and Important News!
A news service that focuses entirely on mental health went online this week. It’s called MindSite News: Shining A Light On Mental Health.
Its first cover story, The Lockdown Inside the Lockdown, exposes how COVID and isolation are further traumatizing young people who are incarcerated.
MindSite News is the brain child of Rob Waters, the news service’s founding editor, journalist Diana Hembree, and Dr. Thomas Insel, the former director of the National Institute of Mental Health, who was instrumental in getting it launched. The news services’s ambitious goal is best explained by its mission statement:
“MindSite News is a new nonprofit, nonpartisan digital journalism organization dedicated to reporting on mental health in America, exposing rampant policy failures and spotlighting efforts to solve them. We seek to create and sustain a sense of national urgency about the workings and failings of the U.S. mental health system and to impact that system through our reporting, making it more equitable, effective, transparent and humane in its care for individuals and families struggling with mental illness.”
MindSite News posts stories about mental illness under six categories: Investigations, Peer Hub, Essays and Interviews, Arts and Culture, Solutions Lab, and Policy Tracker.
Under Peer Hub, you’ll find a story about a Vietnamese therapist who is using his own experiences as a refugee to help Afghans arriving in our country. If you click on Solutions Lab, you’ll find a story that asks if having a guarantee income would reduce mental illnesses in America. There’s also a profile: Plagued in her youth by anxiety and panic attacks, a California educator now works to curb student suicide. Under Policy Tracker you’ll find a story about the coming 9-8-8 Crisis Hotline that supposedly will greatly improve local services.
A news service staffed by veteran reporters writing about the good, bad, and ugly in our mental health system is bound to help improve out fractured and inadequate system. Editor Waters’ decision to feature Reporter Nell Bernstein’s investigation about how incarcerated youth are suffering because of Covid is a promising sign of what MindSite News will offer in the future.
In Lockdown Inside the Lockdown, Bernstein quotes Gladys Carrion, a research scholar at Columbia University, warning:
In many facilities, young people “have been totally isolated. In some places, kids have been in the room for 24/7, or 23/7. They have been deprived of any kind of stimulus. Under that rubric of keeping kids safe, you’ve really exacerbated the mental health challenges that young people have experienced.”
Editor Waters also contributed a story entitled: Enlisting Mental Health Workers, Not Cops, in Mobile Crisis Response about CAHOOTS, a thirty-year-old Oregon program, that has reduced calls to police and saved money.
Helping launch a news service exclusively about mental health is typical of the innovative thinking of Dr. Insel, who has spent much of his career exploring out-of-the-box solutions for mental health problems. He is well-known in mental health circles and is a compassionate advocate committed to helping others. He offered me invaluable advice when my adult son was in the midst of a mental health crisis. He urged me to become my son’s partner, not just his parent. Here’s a snippet of what he advised.
“You got to get him involved in his own care. What you want to do is to be able to join the person in the world that they are in at the same time that you help identify the healthy part of their function so you can say to them: what is it you are trying to accomplish and how can we help you get there.”
I will be eager to read what Editor Waters and his talented group of writers will be posting on MindSite News.
Meet the editors.
Rob Waters, the founding editor, is an award-winning health and mental health journalist and contributing writer to Health Affairs. Waters has worked as a staff reporter or editor at Bloomberg News, Time Inc. Health and Psychotherapy Networker. His articles have appeared in the Washington Post, Kaiser Health News, STAT, the Atlantic.com, Mother Jones and many other outlets. He was a 2005 fellow with the Carter Center for Mental Health Journalism. His awards include a beat reporting award in 2021 from the American Health Care Journalists Association, an award from the National Institute for Health Care Management for excellence in reporting, and a 2021 award from the Society of Professional Journalists, NorCal branch, for his mental health coverage.
Rob Waters, Founding Editor
Diana Hembree, founding co-editor, is a health and science journalist who has won more than two dozen national awards. Hembree served as the longtime editor in chief and AVP of the medical content startup Consumer Health Interactive, which included channels on mental health and depression and reached more than 3 million unique visitors a month. She served as a senior editor at Time Inc. Health and its physician’s magazine, Hippocrates, and as news editor at the Center for Investigative Reporting for more than 10 years. She worked as a science writer for the Center for Youth Wellness, a non-profit that focused on childhood trauma and resilience, and is currently a content strategist for the Center for Care Innovations. Bonus fact: While studying psychobiology at college, she taught rats how to play soccer using operant conditioning.
Diana Hembree, Founding Co-Editor
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