From Anna Rankin in The Guardian: ‘There’s a huge problem’: New Zealand searches for new ways to tackle family violence… Joshua Wilson* [not his real name] was abandoned at birth and then adopted into a family where he was sexually abused by his father and violently tormented by his mother.

Cycling through state-run boys’ homes, he battled addiction and later wrestled with thoughts of ending his own life. On a particularly difficult night last month, Wilson sat alone in the bush, “contemplating being another statistic”, he says. He messaged these thoughts to his estranged partner, who responded with a link to a mental health app called innerBoy.

“It opened my eyes – it’s changed my life forever.”

The app is a digital tool designed to help men regulate their emotions by delving into their histories, patterns of thinking and behaviour. It is part of a growing effort in New Zealand to find new ways to address critically high rates of family violence by tackling mental health issues, trauma and abuse.

My take: Right now, this app is available only in New Zealand. I’ve sent a request to Matt and Sarah Brown, who developed the app, for an interview. In an article about batterer intervention programs that I’ll post next week, so many of the (mostly) men in those programs say: “If I’d been taught this when I was in high school, I wouldn’t be here today.”

NPR’s Michaeleen Doucleff reported on how Ozempic also seems to reduce other cravings.

“I remember going to dinner for the first time [while taking Ozempic],” [J. Paul] Grayson explains. “I ordered a beer, took a sip, and I couldn’t finish it,” he says. “You know how sometimes you taste a beer, and it’s like, ‘Oh my God, this tastes so good that I want to guzzle it.’ Well, I didn’t feel like guzzling. I just really felt like sipping it.”

And instead of having several beers with dinner, Grayson stopped at just one drink.

In the past year, prescriptions for both the diabetes drug Ozempic and its weight-loss counterpart Wegovy have skyrocketed, despite the fact that each costs about $1,000 a month and some health insurers recently stopped covering them.

With the drug’s surge in popularity, doctors and patients have begun to notice a striking side effect of these drugs: They appear to reduce people’s cravings for alcohol, nicotine and opioids. They may also reduce some types of compulsive behaviors, such as gambling and online shopping.

My take: Maybe this drug can jump-start people into experiencing success with changing the coping mechanisms they developed as a result of adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) and give them hope that they can change. Understanding their ACEs helps people grok that they weren’t born bad, that they had no control over their lives when they were children, that they coped appropriately given that they weren’t offered healthy ways to cope, and that they can heal.