Morning Briefing
Summaries of health policy coverage from major news organizations
Longer Looks: Interesting Reads You Might Have Missed
When most people picture U.S. prisons, they don’t usually imagine green plants, vibrant murals, wooden furniture, cuddly dogs or fish tanks. In most facilities, they’d be right. But at SCI Chester, a medium-security prison outside Philadelphia, a small pilot unit known as “Little Scandinavia” is testing whether that kind of environment, modeled on the prisons of Nordic countries like Norway and Denmark, can not only change how prisons look, but also how they work. (Lartey, 4/19)
When police opened fire on Victor Perez , the autistic, nonverbal 17-year-old with cerebral palsy was experiencing a mental health crisis. Advocates say his death reflects a potential for violence that people with disabilities, in particular, can experience when encountering police. Perez’s death is part of a much larger pattern, explained Zoe Gross, director of advocacy for the Washington, D.C.-based Autistic Self Advocacy Network, a group run by and for people with autism. Police with little awareness of autism are sometimes too quick to act. (Hampton, 4/22)
A growing understanding of how “reproductive” hormones sculpt the brain could transform the management of neurological conditions. (Gross, 4/22)
If you have ever had a song on repeat in your brain, you are not alone. Catching an earworm — or having “involuntary musical imagery” in psychological parlance — is exceedingly common and universal. (Sima, 4/24)
People with dementia often forget even close family members as the disease advances. “It can throw people into an existential crisis,” one expert said. (Span, 4/20)
Timberline Knolls, a mental health center owned by Acadia Healthcare, skimped on staff. Then came a series of tragedies. (Silver-Greenberg and Thomas, 4/22)
René Damgaard, 67, lies in a hospital bed in the palliative care unit at Hvidovre hospital outside Copenhagen. It’s the first evening of May, and the window is open, letting mild air and the sound of a blackbird singing into the room. “This is the kind of weather you love the most. When you usually stand and fish at the sandbank,” says his niece, 53-year-old Mette Damgaard. She is leaning over the bed, her face very close to his. She has been sitting like this for a long time. (Vaaben, 4/22)
