Recovery Update

Some Arizona mental health advocates remain hopeful that a county-based limit on who gets beds at the state's highest-level psychiatric hospital will go away. Senate Bill 1813, sponsored by Sierra Vista Republican Sen. David Gowan, would ensure that patients are admitted to the 117-bed civil side of the Arizona State Hospital solely based on clinical need and not on their county of residence. The bill is still alive and the next step in the legislative process is the House Rules Committee, though no vote had been scheduled as of April 14.

After spending six months examining the state's involuntary commitment process, a special North Carolina House committee released a list of recommendations recently aimed at improving the state's intertwined mental health and criminal justice systems.

Scientists who use imaging to understand the brain's complexity often focus on the strongest signals and ignore the rest. But this strategy, researchers warn, may reveal only the tip of the iceberg. A new study published in Nature Human Behavior reveals that connections routinely overlooked as "noise" during neuroimaging data analysis can predict behavior with remarkable accuracy—and implicate entirely different brain networks.

An extensive register-based study conducted in Finland has found an increase in severe mental health problems among some adolescents and young adults who have undergone medical gender reassignment (GR). According to the research, young people who underwent gender identity assessments with the hope of receiving medical GR required psychiatric treatment for severe mental health problems three times more often than age-matched controls. The paper is published in the journal Acta Paediatrica.