Psychiatric-Mental Health Monthly News Digest August 2026

Clinical Practice & Care Delivery

• U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved Orzeyful (oveporexton) tablets for adults with narcolepsy type 1, the first therapy to directly restore orexin signaling and address excessive sleepiness, cataplexy, sleep paralysis, hallucinations, and disrupted nighttime sleep as a unified disorder.
• U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs announced a $29 million program to provide eligible homeless Veterans and HUD-VASH participants with emergency goods, communications technology, and transportation to medical, counseling, housing, and employment appointments.
• Nurse.org provided a nursing perspective on a proposed CMS update to Medicare payment plans for hospitals and clinicians, giving clinical software its own name, payment pathway, and billing label, called Software as a Medical Service (SaMS), in its 2027 hospital outpatient rule.
• The Australian College of Mental Health Nurses announced a Mental Health Nursing Minimum Dataset Committee and a two-year program of work to examine workforce supply, demand, distribution, and future need across public, private, community, primary-care, alcohol and other drug, justice, and digitally enabled settings.

Research & Evidence

• Nurse.org released 2026 PMHNP Workforce Report: Where Psychiatric NPs Are Most Needed. Based on an analysis of federal data, the report says there is a nearly fivefold difference in the PMHNP supply between states.
  • Coming soon: 2026 APNA State of the PMH Nursing Workforce Report and the second APNA PMH Nursing Workforce Survey.
• A Penn Nursing report described survey findings from 740 inpatient PMH-RNs at 297 hospitals in 10 states where approximately 38% reported high burnout, 29.5% job dissatisfaction, and 22% an intention to leave their employer within one year; staffing adequacy was the lowest-rated work-environment domain. View APNA’s PMH Nurse Well-Being Report here.

• From the July/August Issue of the Journal of the American Psychiatric Nurses Association:

  • A cross-sectional descriptive survey in the Journal of the American Psychiatric Nurses Association of 34 PMHNP programs found broad agreement that tobacco treatment belongs in PMHNP education, yet most respondents reported spending fewer than three curricular hours on the topic. View the newly updated APNA Position: Psychiatric-mental Health Nursing’s Role in Nicotine and Tobacco Use Disorder Treatment.

  • A quality-improvement project in the Journal of the American Psychiatric Nurses Association on pharmacogenetic testing vs. standard depression care found that the standard-care group had a higher recorded remission rate. In contrast, the pharmacogenetic group included more patients classified with moderate or severe depression.
• JAMA featured a multisite randomized clinical trial comparing ‘Impact of Killing’ psychotherapy with present-centered therapy in 100 veterans with PTSD and distress related to killing in war.
• U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs launched PIVOT, a randomized controlled trial comparing two psilocybin dose levels in Veterans with treatment-resistant major depressive disorder, including participants with concurrent PTSD, across five VA sites.
• JAMA highlighted a prognostic study used administrative data from nearly 1.93 million periodic health assessments completed by 668,684 U.S. Army soldiers. Machine-learning models showed fair discrimination for suicide deaths and good discrimination for nonfatal attempts, but the high-risk groups overlapped only partly. Sensitivity remained limited even in the highest predicted-risk groups.
• A JAMA Psychiatry Special Communication synthesizes evidence on major depressive disorder and selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor use during pregnancy.

Published August 2026.

This summary was informed by human-guided AI tools. Readers are encouraged to review the supporting links for full information.