Each week brings new conversations about mental health, technology, and care. Between Sessions gathers what's worth your attention - so you can stay informed without adding to your workload.
🔒 Regulation & Compliance
A new analysis published this week covers Operation PAR's 2025 breach, in which the Florida treatment provider notified 145,714 clients this summer, and explains how a 2024 rule now extends HIPAA-style breach notification to 42 CFR Part 2 records.
👉 Why it matters: Any practice handling SUD records now answers to two overlapping confidentiality frameworks under one notification standard - worth confirming your plan covers both.
🧠 Clinical Update
A Carilion Clinic study tested METRIC, an online training program meant to help psychiatric clinicians use standardized symptom questionnaires consistently, and found clinicians rated it acceptable and feasible, with positive attitudes toward measurement-based care holding steady before and after training.
👉 Why it matters: Sustaining measurement-based care is usually the hard part, not believing in it - early evidence for a low-lift training approach that works without changing minds first.
🧩 AI & Mental Health
Researchers from Oxford, UCL, and the UK AI Security Institute published a Nature Medicine study testing nine AI chatbots across 810 simulated conversations, finding supportive responses can turn harmful when they reinforce a user's specific vulnerability.
👉 Why it matters: Risk built gradually with vulnerability, not one message - useful for discussing chatbot use with at-risk clients, though this is a stress test, not a frequency estimate.
💬 In the Room
A CESifo working paper followed 12,000+ French adults who chatted daily with an AI or continued as usual for 28 days, finding the chats felt pleasant but coincided with rising loneliness, falling life satisfaction, and more depressive affect.
👉 Why it matters: If clients mention leaning on a chatbot for company, this is early but research-backed reason to gently ask how that's actually landing for them.
🏥 Practice & Business
Ensora Health, a practice-management vendor, found in its 2026 Practice Success Report that 95% of the 1,124 therapists surveyed valued five practice-health measures, yet only 7% track all five and just 18% call their practice thriving.
👉 Why it matters: The gap between what practices value and measure shows up in missed billing and early dropouts - small tracking habits, not paperwork, set thriving practices apart.
📖 One Good Read
A weekly roundup from the MGH Center for Women's Mental Health (Aug 14) covers new findings on medication safety in pregnancy and postpartum - hypnotics, antidepressants, benzodiazepines.
🫐 From Berries This Week
This week, Berries shared a new way to reflect on your clinical work, plus a conversation on using brain data instead of guesswork in mental health care.
New feature - Insights: Reflect on your clinical work from a new perspective, with key takeaways, clinical approaches, and connections drawn from each session.
Podcast: Kym Tolson talks with Dr. Steve Rondeau, a naturopathic doctor who has analyzed more than 50,000 brain scans, about how objective brain data can reveal why two clients with the same diagnosis need different treatment approaches.
🤝 Closing
This week's findings highlight that what your clients need most from you has not changed - a person who's actually paying attention.
As always, thank you for your truly important work.
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This newsletter is intended for informational and educational purposes only. It does not constitute clinical, legal, or regulatory guidance. Clinicians should rely on their professional judgment and applicable standards of care when integrating any technology into practice.