Black women in the United States face unique challenges related to hair-based discrimination, which the Creating a Respectful and Open World for Natural Hair (CROWN) Act of 2022 aims to address by prohibiting such discrimination in workplaces, schools, and other settings. However, limited research explores the act's direct impact on Black women's mental health. This scoping review, guided by the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic reviews and Meta-Analyses, extension for Scoping Reviews (or PRISMA-ScR), examined literature on the CROWN Act's influence on Black women's mental health. A comprehensive search of six databases (2019-2024) identified 310 articles, with 15 meeting inclusion criteria. Data were synthesized qualitatively to identify themes. Findings underscore the psychological toll of hair-based discrimination, including increased anxiety, stress, and trauma. While the CROWN Act is seen as a transformative policy, no studies directly measure its mental health impact. Existing evidence suggests reducing discrimination may alleviate chronic stress, but findings remain inferential. This review highlights the need for longitudinal and quantitative studies to evaluate the act's effectiveness in addressing mental health disparities. Hair-based discrimination continues to affect Black women's mental health, and while the CROWN Act provides critical protections, further research is necessary to link these policies to measurable mental health outcomes, strengthening advocacy and policy efforts.

Too often, researchers focus on individual behavior to explain health disparities characterizing queer and trans communities. This article uses ecosocial and queer theories to highlight the mechanisms and causal pathways contributing to poor health outcomes, focusing on the concepts of embodiment, whereby individuals physiologically and psychologically incorporate their environment, and erasure, whereby healthcare professionals, computer information systems, and national surveys render them invisible. Authors enumerate the specific pathways in the categories of cisnormativity and heteronormativity, institutional discrimination and structural violence, interpersonal violence and rejection, and internalized oppression, giving special attention to the ways in which the healthcare system contributes to health inequity for queer and trans people. The article concludes with a description of the implications of this approach to understanding queer and trans health inequity for those in the fields of social work and public health, including educators, researchers, funders, and clinicians, and calling for radically reimagining how we understand ourselves in relation to one another.

Child maltreatment is one of the most traumatic experiences that affect the development of children and adolescents. However, few studies have examined whether a history of greater exposure to multiple types of child maltreatment would impair the victims' life satisfaction. This study applied the multitype maltreatment framework to a sample of adolescents from rural China to investigate life satisfaction of children who have experienced multitype maltreatment and to examine the mediating effects of health literacy and perceived stress. This study employed a cross-sectional survey design and used a two-stage clustered sampling method. A sample of 815 (M = 16.17, SD = 1.53) adolescents was used for analysis. Results showed that children who have experienced multitype maltreatment have poorer life satisfaction, poorer health literacy, and higher perceived stress, compared with those who have experienced a single form of maltreatment and those who have experienced none. Multitype child maltreatment impacts the degree of the victims' life satisfaction not only directly but also indirectly, through health literacy and perceived stress (p < .001). Further longitudinal research using multidimensional measures of multitype maltreatment (e.g., severity and frequency) is needed to inform trauma-focused health promotion programs.

This study focused on services for displaced patients at a Shanghai tertiary hospital and explored how social workers went through ethical dilemmas from an ecological and care ethics perspective. Using clinical data mining, the authors analyzed 49 case records, revealing that patients encountered multifaceted challenges stemming from personal, familial, medical, and social systems. This research led to a social work intervention model, focusing on the empowerment of the individual system, reconstruction of the family system, coordination of the medical system, and integration of the social system. It is recommended that medical social workers adopt a systematic approach to address the diverse needs of displaced patients, and foster collaboration across personal, familial, medical, and social domains, emphasizing empowering patients and families in ethical decision making, striving to align resources with needs amid social structural challenges, and advocating policy support and establishing a care system, while critically evaluating the application of care ethics in these cases.

Social workers in hospital settings transformed their practice to meet the needs of patients, caregivers, and interdisciplinary team members during the COVID-19 pandemic. This included developing telehealth expertise to address patient and family needs, particularly at the end of life. In this pilot study, 10 hospital social workers from one New England tertiary adult medical center participated in a focus group (n = 7) or structured interview (n = 3). Guided by the four constructs of the social ecological model, four major themes emerged from the data highlighting hospital social workers' role situating the needs of patients, families, team members, and themselves in a larger sociopolitical context. These themes included transformative practice and learning, changing roles of the social worker, seeing and understanding the larger social justice context and its impact on patient care, and adapting to telehealth. In this pilot study, authors outline findings that provide formative data that can be useful in informing social work practice and leadership in future pandemics beyond COVID-19 while also addressing the existing inequities in healthcare that were highlighted by this work.