A new Ontario study found emergency department visits for gambling disorders increased 31.3% following online gambling legalization, with men and boys comprising 72% of visits and experiencing increases of 154% among ages 10-29. Most patients had concurrent substance use or mental health issues, including suicidal ideation.
NPR investigated ChatGPT's Trusted Contact feature, designed to alert designated contacts when the bot detects suicide risk in users. Despite OpenAI claiming good adoption since May, the feature is difficult for users to discover, not prominently advertised during onboarding, and only functions if users proactively enable it in settings.
Harvard researcher Matthew Nock's study of 600+ high-risk adults and adolescents successfully predicted 75% of suicide attempts and 87% of suicide-related events in the week before they occurred, using real-time app-based surveys. This represents a significant advance over traditional prediction models that focus on longer timeframes, addressing a critical gap in clinical care where half of suicide deaths involve recent contact with clinicians.