@sashazabelski
Research Associate @ Sheps Center for Health Services Research Trying to take an interdisciplinary approach to improving community mental health services through organizational, policy, and imp sci approaches. W: https://sashazabelski.squarespace.com/
#SuicideResearch feed for awareness and please share.
Author and journalist Rob Wipond is looking for 988 call center workers to interview for an upcoming story. I trust Rob's work and have collaborated with him in the past, and that is ongoing now.
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Under a proposed Colorado law, people leaving prison would be entitled to identification documents and $100 in a release allowance. “We have to equip these people who are returning to our communities to have a fighting chance at success,” state Rep. Jamie Jackson said.
By @sarawilson.bsky.social
Amazing!! Congratulations! 👏🏻👏🏻
This part right here. AI chat bots are a bandaid to a MUCH larger structural issue. The NYT article out today discusses how AI chat bots for health are not more useful than just looking things up online when just given straight to patients. We cannot tech our way out of this problem.
"But less noticed in the brouhaha over rates: CMS also proposed restricting plans from conducting what are called “chart reviews” of their customers." kffhealthnews.org/news/article...
You can read my latest op-ed below on the promising legislation making credentialing easier for MH providers but also missing some critical shortfalls such as low reimbursement rates and holding insurance companies accountable to implement new processes (which we know doesn’t always go well).
Academia is so incredibly fucked up and also a lot of the intellectual work that goes on in the academy is incredibly important
Part of what makes life in the academy tough is holding and navigating both of these truths at the same time
gonna keep being annoying about this because i have to but i am 4 participants away from being able to close out this pilot so if you can help me out by reposting if you’re not eligible for the screener, it would be a massive help!!
Medical tourism is a MASSIVE industry for a reason. For USians, the cost of a trip to Turkey plus fees for medical or dental care is (often) still less than getting the same care in the U.S..
Pew's first survey on trust in science under Trump's second term was published today
Democrats are worried about the US's role as a scientific leader. Republicans—not so much
www.statnews.com/2026/01/15/a...
The article does say SAMHSA is still under threat and that the workforce has been cut in half in the last year. www.politico.com/news/2026/01...
We are collecting information on terminated SAMHSA grants at Grant Witness: grant-witness.us/submit-samhs...
If you worked on one of these programs, please let us know at the link! And please share with your colleagues. We need a comprehensive record of these terminations to fight back!
First, I want to extend my gratitude to all the people who have reached out from across the country and around the world to support our family. This kindness of strangers is the most fitting tribute because if you ever encountered my wife, Renee Nicole Macklin Good, you know that above all else, she was kind, In fact, kindness radiated out of her. Renee sparkled. She literally sparkled. I mean, she didn't wear glitter but I swear she had sparkles coming out of her pores. All the time. You might think it was just my love talking but her family said the same thing. Renee was made of sunshine, Renee lived by an overarching belief: there is kindness in the world and we need to do everything we can to find it Where it resides and nurture it where it needs to grow Renee was a Christian who knew that all religions teach the same essential truth: we are here to love each other, care for each other, and keep each other safe and whole. Like people have done across place and time, we moved to make a better life for ourselves. We chose Minnesota to make our home. Our whole extended road trip here, we held hands in the car while our son drew all over the windows to pass the time and the miles,
What we found when we got here was a vibrant and welcoming community, we made friends and spread joy: And while any place we were together was home, there was a strong shared sense here in Minneapolis that we were looking out for each other. Here, I had finally found peace and safe harbor. That has been taken from me forever. We were raising our son to believe that no matter where you come from or what you look like, all of us deserve compassion and kindness. Renee lived this belief every day. She is pure love. She is pure joy. She is pure sunshine On Wednesday, January 7th, we stopped to support our neighbors. We had whistles. They had guns. Renee leaves behind three extraordinary children; the youngest is just six years old and already lost his father. I am now left to raise our son and to continue teaching him, as Renee believed, that there are people building a better world for him. That the people who did this had fear and anger in their hearts, and we need to show them a better way. We thank you for the privacy you are granting our family as we grieve. We thank you for ensuring that Renee's legacy is one of kindness and love. We honor her memory by living her values: rejecting hate and choosing compassion, turning away from fear and pursuing peace, refusing division and knowing we must come together to build a world where we all come home safe to the people we love. E
Renee Macklin Good's wife, Becca Good, released a statement and it moved me to sobbing tears:
archive.is/ur35j
The veto override has failed. Several dozen Republicans defied President Trump, but not enough to reach the 2/3 needed for an override. Colorado’s Arkansas Valley Conduit project is in limbo.
Not coincidentally, the states losing federal money are among the few that guarantee families more than the most inhumane level of cash assistance.
Slowly realizing even my political friends who say they hate AI are using it to speed up tasks like email writing, formatting grant applications etc
Important publication (by @ginnybraun.bsky.social and co-authors) to add to any critical AI reading list.
journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...
everything I hear from the charity world is apocalyptic at the moment.
Horrible.
Yay! Congratulations!!!
Applications are open! AcademyHealth and Amgen are looking for mentors for a new Applied Implementation Science Fellowship Program. Mentors will receive a $25K stipend per year for this two-year program. Apply by February 13: buff.ly/iAHeK4G
“Back in June, medical researchers discovered a similar racial bias in large language model (LLM) psychiatric diagnostic tools. In that case, results showed AI tools often proposed “inferior treatment” plans for Black patients whenever their race was explicitly known.”
🔍📣 Seeking APA 2026 co-presenters! 🤝
Looking for symposia on language equity/cultural competence in mental health. My 2nd-year PhD student, Temma Schaechter, will present qualitative work on Yiddish-speaking providers & multilingual care.
DM me. 🔄 Reposts appreciated
Academics and technologists are sounding the alarm about a growing crisis in scholarship as we know it: AI-generated citations of nonexistent papers that have infested real journals. Despite being fake, the sources are widely assumed to be authentic the more they appear in published literature.
In case anyone is curious about how this whole climate change thing is going, I just saw wasps flying around in DECEMBER in Colorado. It's all fine...
1/n Out today in @jamapsychiatry.com: Interpretation Issues With the Patient Health Questionnaire Instructions. We find troubling variability in whether people think they should respond based on the frequency of the Sx or the frequency of being bothered by the Sx.
jamanetwork.com/journals/jam...
Russ Vought (piss man) tweet about doing piss man shit: The National Science Foundation will be breaking up the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) in Boulder, Colorado. This facility is one of the largest sources of climate alarmism in the country. A comprehensive review is underway & any vital activities such as weather research will be moved to another entity or location.
NSF is about to dismantle NCAR at Russell Vought's direction to protect the fossil fuel industry. It's hard to communicate just how much NCAR does, so let's take a look: I've never worked at NCAR, and I've worked with NCAR researchers once ever. What scientific discoveries has NCAR made possible? 👇
title: Cheap science, real harm: the cost of replacing human participation with synthetic data author: Abeba Birhane abstract: Driven by the goals of augmenting diversity, increasing speed, reducing cost, the use of synthetic data as a replacement for human participants is gaining traction in AI research and product development. This talk critically examines the claim that synthetic data can “augment diversity,” arguing that this notion is empirically unsubstantiated, conceptually flawed, and epistemically harmful. While speed and cost-efficiency may be achievable, they often come at the expense of rigour, insight, and robust science. Drawing on research from dataset audits, model evaluations, Black feminist scholarship, and complexity science, I argue that replacing human participants with synthetic data risks producing both real-world and epistemic harms at worst and superficial knowledge and cheap science at best
I wrote this brief talk on why “augmenting diversity” with LLMs is empirically unsubstantiable, conceptually flawed, and epistemically harmful and a nice surprise to see the organisers have made it public
synthetic-data-workshop.github.io/papers/13.pdf
After taking over housing and healthcare, private equity is now buying up software used by volunteer fire departments — making it even harder for rural communities to respond to emergencies.
The only winners from private equity's price-gouging spree are wealthy investors.
