Good morning! ☀️

And Happy Sunday!

We’re piloting a (small) newsletter program for mental health professionals with the goal of making new mental health research accessible. We’ll be sending out concise and interesting summaries of the latest mental health research weekly, and strategies for using this research in your practice. In return, we will ask for some feedback. If you’re interested, just reply to this email with “interested”. We’re looking for around 5-10 people.

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That being said, this week, we asked DALL-E (not to be confused with Wall-E), an artificial intelligence system that generates images and art from a prompt, to create a few paintings about “social workers in 21st century America”. These are the 4 paintings it generated. Let us know what you think!

Question: Today, a more practical question - What is the most common insurance reimbursement rate per session for a clinician working in private practice?

News

The Government’s (New-ish) Plan to Targeting Homelessness

The most recent estimate of the homeless population in the United States is between 580,000 and 1.3 million people. You’ll notice that there’s quite a gap in that estimate: The reasons are that people cycle through homelessness and that different measures lead to different estimates.

In December 2022, the Biden-Harris administration set a plan to reduce homelessness by 25%. This plan is “built around three foundational pillars and three solutions pillars”. The foundational pillars are:

• Leading with equity

• Focusing on data and evidence

• Increasing collaboration across public and private sectors

The solutions pillars are:

• Preventing people from losing homes in the first place

• Improving crises response when people lose their homes

• Scaling up housing and services for people who are exiting homelessness

In addition to this, the plan is rooted in a “housing first” model, a homeless assistance approach that prioritizes offering homeless people permanent and unconditional housing, as opposed to an approach offering services first and housing later. The housing first approach has already been adopted in other countries including Finland.

For more information on this initiative, you can read through this recent interview featuring Jeff Olivet, the executive director of the U.S. Interagency Council on Homelessness, or this review the fact sheet by the Biden-Harris Administration.

Other social work-related news

• When should social workers separate families? A federal lawsuit was filed by Sarah Perkins and Joshua Sabey, parents of two young children who were briefly taken by the State of Massachusetts after a hospital visit uncovered that the child had a rib fracture. The lawsuit attempts to set a legal precedent nationwide that there should be a “neutral judge in child removal decisions unless there is an emergency situation”

• “The parents of a 22-year-old Colorado man in a mental health crisis killed by police are to receive $19m from government state and local agencies.” The unfortunate reality is that these kinds of incidents will continue to occur because we don’t have adequate support for people with severe mental illness (SMI). One type of support for people with SMI which is quite unknown but seemingly effective is the clubhouse model (not the social app), a community-based location designed to support the recovery of people living with serious mental illness

• Georgia, Arkansas, and Missouri enacted anti-trans policies that made it more difficult for people with autism and those with mental health conditions to obtain gender-affirming care. The enacted policies “suggest that the provision of such care should be withheld from autistic people, require doctors to determine whether a patient seeking gender-affirming care has autism, or require doctors to ensure that symptoms of lifelong mental health issues are ‘resolved’ prior to treatment”

• California has spent over $1 billion to fight the opioid crisis, but things keep getting worse. The main problem is fentanyl, a powerful man-made drug that's 100 times stronger than Morphine. In California, more people die from drug overdoses than car accidents, homicides, diabetes, or lung cancer

Reads on research

• A recent report on youth mental health examined the usage of mental health services by children and young people between 2016 and 2022. The findings revealed a significant rise of over 200% in the number of hospital admissions for anxiety and fear-related disorders, as well as for feeding and eating disorders among children and young adults

• An analysis of more than 175,000 individuals suggests that poor physical health scores could be a better indicator of mental illness than changes detected on brain scans. People with schizohprenia, for example, are three times more likely to develop diabetes

Reads on policy

• A bill in New Jersey was signed into law a few weeks ago which enabled mental health professionals such as psychiatrists, psychologists, clinical social workers and marriage and family therapists to help people in emergency shelters on a part-time or full-time basis. Apparently, red tape made it really difficult for people in shelters to obtain access to mental health care previously. The bill can be found here

• In Nebraska, a bill was passed that will expand access to mental health services and substance use treatment through the creation of new community behavioral health clinics

Tech, social work, and other resources 😎

• WearNet, a new deep-learning model (a technique used in Artificial Intelligence), uses Fitbit data to “gain insights into an individual’s risk for depression and anxiety.” The goal is to conduct research that would allow us to better detect mental health issues through wearables

• An NASW podcast episode on preventing fetal alcohol spectrum disorders

• Two weeks ago, we shared an article on Pear Therapuetics, the company that created digital therapeutics as a treatment for mental health disorders. The company had a valuation of $1.6 billion two years ago, but was “sold for parts” recently for $6 million after failing to secure reimbursement for its treatments

Answer: This answer comes from a report by Heard, which found that the most common “typical reimbursement rate” for a therapist in private practice who takes insurance is between $100 and $125.

The report also found that the biggest expense for these clinicians was rent and that most had business expenses of under $25,000 in 2022.

P.S. If you found this interesting or informative, please share it with a colleague or friend.