CSDE Affiliate Meghan Romanelli’s collaborative research with colleagues at NYU on adolescent suicide recently received significant attention across the nation. A UW News article summarizes the research findings about how feelings and thoughts are linked to behavior and how those relationships differ across gender, race, and ethnicity. With analyses of the National Youth Risk Behavior surveys form 2015, 2017, and 2019, Romanelli’s team finds that prior research obscured important differences between behavior and thoughts across groups. Instead, these differences are significant and profound. Their study published in Prevention Science finds that Black high school students are almost twice as likely as white students to attempt suicide without reporting any thoughts or plans. And students across racial and ethnic groups who reported certain factors or behaviors — being bullied online, feeling sad or hopeless, a history of sexual violence, smoking cigarettes or misusing prescription opiates — were more likely to report thinking about, planning and attempting suicide, as opposed to having thoughts and plans without an attempt.

CSDE Affiliate Donald Chi recently published an Opinion article on The Hill. The article, “Adding Dental Benefits to Medicare,” describes now only how dental care is a privilege afforded to only 30% of older adults in the U.S. Chi highlights several key lessons from Medicaid programming that could be used to strengthen an expanded Medicare policy.