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In her November 2021 Narrative Matters essay, Nora Super, senior director of the Milken Institute Center for the Future of Aging and executive director of the Milken Institute Alliance to Improve Dementia Care, shares her story of living with major depression and calls for better treatments.

Super describes her onset of depression and the multiple treatments she tried before finding success with electroconvulsive therapy. She also discusses why she decided to share her story after the deaths of Kate Spade and Anthony Bourdain in 2018.

“I’ve observed that many high-achieving people experience bouts of major depression, but we generally hide it from others…When we can no longer perform at such intense levels, depression convinces us that we are failures and worthless,” she writes. “In disclosing my illness to others, I’ve discovered that most people I know have been touched by mental illness in some way.”

To do more for people living with depression, Super argues that we need to reduce stigma, make care more accessible and equitable, better support alternative treatment options, and explore social prescribing.

Listen to Super read her essay on the latest Narrative Matters podcast.

This week on Health Affairs Blog, Tod Ibrahim and Kevin Longino argued that Congress and the Biden administration must include kidney research in any future funding related to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Lynn Blewett and Minnesota House Rep. Jennifer Schultz explained Minnesota's approach to helping people who fall into the "family glitch" gap in Affordable Care Act coverage.

And, in a new GrantWatch post, Tina Kauh argued that more financial support from funders is needed to disaggregate health care data and adequately capture racial and ethnic diversity.

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The centerpiece of the December Health Affairs Journal Club meeting is “Despite National Declines In Kidney Failure Incidence, Disparities Widened Between Low- And High-Poverty Counties.” In the paper, which will appear in the December 2021 issue of the journal, Kevin Nguyen and coauthors examine trends in the incidence of kidney failure by county-level poverty among US adults between 2000 and 2017. While national estimates suggest that overall rates are declining, the authors found marked disparity in incidence of kidney failure between low- and high-poverty counties.

Health Affairs Senior Editor Jessica Bylander will host Nguyen, an investigator in the Department of Health Services, Policy, and Practice at the Brown University School of Public Health, to talk in detail about the research, methods, and conclusions of the paper, including changes in policy and care delivery that will be required to close the gap for low-income areas and communities.

Date:     Thursday, December 9, 2021
Time:     1:00 p.m. – 2:00 p.m. (ET)
Place:    Online details will be shared with registrants 24 hours in advance of the event.

About Health Affairs

Health Affairs is the leading peer-reviewed journal at the intersection of health, health care, and policy. Published monthly by Project HOPE, the journal is available in print and online. Late-breaking content is also found through healthaffairs.org, Health Affairs Today, and Health Affairs Sunday Update.

Project HOPE is a global health and humanitarian relief organization that places power in the hands of local health care workers to save lives across the globe. Project HOPE has published Health Affairs since 1981.

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