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Mental Health

Features about CPTSD, recovery and the mental health industry for starnetwork.org 

STAR Network •

Hayden Panettiere's Memoir: The Reckoning Was Hers

Hayden Panettiere — actress, singer, child-star — died on August 16 in Greenville, South Carolina. She was 36. Police found no signs of foul play, and the cause of her death has not been determined; an investigation is ongoing.


Her memoir, This Is Me: A Reckoning, was published on May 19 — twelve weeks ago. In it, and in the interviews around it, she gave a first-person account of nearly everything the coverage of her death is now reconstructing secondhand: the child acting career, the postpa...
STAR Network •

The Tide Comes In: Colorado's Coercive Control Law Takes Effect

On August 12, Colorado House Bill 26-1309 — “Abuse in Cases of Separation” — takes effect. When we wrote about it in July, it was a law on paper. Now it is a law in the courtroom, and the courtroom it changes most is the one survivors fear most: family court.


Sponsored by Representatives Meg Froelich and Tammy Story and Senator Katie Wallace, and signed by Governor Jared Polis on May 27, the bill did two things. The first was expanding Colorado’s definition of domestic violence to include coe...
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The Federal Medicaid 80-Hour Work Requirement: What Survivors on Medicaid Need to Know Now

On July 31, a new federal Medicaid rule became final. Starting in 2027 — and already, in a few states — most adults who get health coverage through Medicaid expansion will need to show they work, study, or volunteer about 80 hours a month to keep it.
The rule was written about a group the law calls able-bodied adults. It does not mention abuse anywhere. It reaches survivors anyway, and more directly than almost anyone else.
The requirement applies to adults ages 19 to 64 who have Medicaid throug...
STAR Network •

Coast to Coast: Canada Just Made Coercive Control a Federal Crime

On June 18, Canada’s Parliament passed Bill C-16, the Protecting Victims Act. On July 18 most of it became enforceable law. This act made femicide — when a woman is killed in circumstances involving coercive control, hate, sexual violence, or exploitation — into a first-degree murder charge. It created a new criminal offence for a pattern of coercive or controlling conduct toward an intimate partner; made threatening to share intimate images, including sexual deepfakes, punishable by up to ten y...
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Narcissistic Abuse and the Power of Film

This summer, two films about narcissistic abuse reach general audiences: I Love You My Narcissist, Ali Schmahl’s psychological drama streaming on AlefCine Stream, and The Narcissist’s Playbook, a documentary from Mark Vicente, the director of HBO’s The Vow. Millions of people, from general audiences to survivors, are about to immerse themselves in the topic. Whether that helps them or harms them is a matter of choices the productions make.


Dr. Jamie Huysman, LCSW, spent twenty years as the cl...
STAR Network •

The Tides Are Changing: Two More States Write Coercive Control Into Law

For decades, survivors were told it wasn’t abuse unless it left a mark. This summer, two more states said otherwise.


There is a sentence almost every STAR has heard, in one form or another: “But he never hit you.” It might have come from a relative who couldn’t understand why you left, or from a police officer standing in your kitchen, or from the judge reviewing your petition. The sentence lands like a verdict, because for most of legal history, it was one. If the harm didn’t leave a visible...
STAR Network •

Mica's Law and the Stalled Fight to Criminalize Coercive Control

Between 2022 and 2024, Mica Miller called the police on her husband seven times. Each time, her sister would later tell South Carolina lawmakers, the officers left without acting. “There was nothing for them to do,” Abigail Francis testified, “since there were no laws to guide them against coercive control.”


Mica Miller died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound in a North Carolina state park on April 27, 2024, two days after serving her husband with divorce papers. She had married John-Paul “JP”...