J. Wesley Boyd, MD, PhD

Kudos to Emma Yasinski for this piece about depriving healthcare workers of the most effective treatment for opioid dependence.

Kudos to Jenni Gritters for this piece about addiction. One of the upshots is that if some drug, activity, or person causes you to jeopardize important elements of your life (such as employment or housing) then you just might be addicted.

I’ve been watching the coverage of the El Paso mass shooting on Fox News for the last hour. To a person, everyone who spoke, including Texas’ Republican governor and Fox News hosts, showed real horror about what happened. It is astounding given the authentic pain that I saw that not once did anyone mention the single government action that has prevented this from happening almost anyplace else in the world.

Good for USA Today for this editorial–I was very surprised and gratified to see they’d quoted me about the lasting harmful effects of what our country is doing to children.

Truly astonishing that our government is actively taking steps to make conditions as horrid as possible for immigrants who are fleeing death in their home countries. For the record, I have seen numerous individuals who only fled their home countries after not one but multiple family members had been killed. I have also yet to see anyone seeking asylum who I thought was malingering. See this story:

https://www.axios.com/child-detention-mental-health-crisis-1fcbbb86-be78-451d-87a8-4a84ee894d01.html

https://www.nbcnews.com/think/opinion/having-health-insurance-doesn-t-mean-mental-health-care-access-ncna1026181

Not sure if I posted this when it came out, but throwing folks in jail for drug use ITSELF ought to be a crime.  They need and deserve our help and treatment.

Kudos to Amina Rahimi, a first year Harvard Medical Student.  She and I co-authored this piece on immigration in Psychology Today.  As the subtitle states:  “Our greatest threat is not immigrants. It is ourselves.”  Interesting that some of the early feedback we’ve received has skirted around some of the facts about immigrants–including undocumented immigrants– regarding employment, health care, or rates of crime and largely failed to mention the data about our own health habits.  I would ask folks to think about the 5 worst/hardest things that they have endured in their lives (loss of a job, a broken relationship, the death of a loved one, etc) and then remember that for almost all of us, undocumented immigrants had nothing to do with any of those things.