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The federal autism advisory committee met for the first time since [President Donald] Trump took office, months after health secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. fired most of the committee’s scientific experts and replaced them with activists and advocates who more closely align with his controversial views on the link between autism, vaccines, and environmental factors. (Broderick, 4/28)

The Texas Medical Board is proposing tighter regulations around ketamine, a popular fast-acting sedative used to treat mental illness, including more physician oversight during administration of the drug and banning in-home use of it. (Simpson, 4/28)

The Chicago Department of Public Health announced a new street psychiatry pilot program and expanded mental health safety net thanks to an investment of over $16 million. The city's Mental Health Equity Initiative partner network, which launched in 2020, has enrolled more than 173,000 new clients between 2020 and 2025. Now it will launch its next phase, the Healthy Chicago Mental Health Collective, the city said. (Tenenbaum, 4/28)

�������ýҕ�l Health News: Saving Lives By Changing Lives: The Next Frontier In Suicide Prevention

Someone in America dies by suicide every 11 minutes. It’s that common. But not normal. Humans have evolved over centuries to survive. So when people try to kill themselves, something has gone wrong. Typically, the assumption is that something happened in the person’s mind — a mental illness. But in recent decades, there’s been a growing movement to ask a different question: What went wrong in the world around that person? (Pattani, 4/29)

The first question Sophie Davies had was: Will it affect my memory? In the three weeks since giving birth, Ms. Davies had been in a downward spiral. She checked herself into the mother-and-baby unit of her hospital in East Anglia, England, where doctors ratcheted up the dose of Prozac she took to manage her obsessive-compulsive disorder. But every morning she woke up in tears, and every time she looked at her baby boy, she felt hollow with guilt. “I’m never going to be able to be a mom,” she recalled thinking, “or if I am, I’m not going to be able to be a good one.” (Gross, 4/28)

Researchers at the University of Hong Kong have developed a new model that was found to predict the risk that individuals with depression will harm themselves with good accuracy. This model, introduced in a paper published in Molecular Psychiatry, could help to devise more effective and personalized depression treatment plans. (Fadelli, 4/27)

Scrolling through picture-perfect motherhood posts online can take a serious toll on moms’ mental health, a new study shows. "It's very problematic, because social media really idealizes motherhood," said study author Ciera Kirkpatrick, assistant professor of advertising and public relations at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. "There's a strong relationship between shame and postpartum depression." (4/28)