In 2014, the Ice Bucket Challenge swept the internet, raising over $115 million for ALS research and transforming how the world engaged with health-focused crowdfunding. A decade later, the viral phenomenon is making a comeback — but with a poignant new purpose: mental health awareness. In 2025, a group of passionate students at the University of South Carolina (USC) have reimagined the concept into a movement called #SpeakYourMIND, an initiative that’s already raising both funds and conversations for the nonprofit Active Minds.

What began as a tribute to ALS (Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis), a debilitating neurological condition, has evolved into a broader commentary on an equally urgent but often less visible public health crisis — mental health. This revival isn’t just about viral stunts; it’s about starting real, transformative dialogue.

Spearheaded by Wade Jefferson, a USC junior and mental health advocate, the new challenge is the centerpiece of the Mental Illness Needs Discussion (MIND) club’s campaign. Jefferson, who founded the club after the tragic loss of two close friends to suicide, envisioned a way to break down stigma and make mental health discussions more accessible, especially among youth. “We wanted to create something visual, visceral, and participatory — a challenge that could remind people how necessary it is to speak up,” Jefferson said.

How the New Ice Bucket Challenge Works?

Much like the original Ice Bucket Challenge, #SpeakYourMIND involves participants filming themselves pouring buckets of ice water over their heads, then nominating others to do the same. But this time, the emphasis lies in sharing personal stories or supportive messages around mental health, tagging friends, and donating to Active Minds.

Launched on Instagram in March 2025, the campaign’s momentum has exceeded all expectations. Initially hoping to raise $500, Jefferson and his team watched donations quickly soar past the $100,000 mark — and counting. High-profile supporters, including former NFL stars Peyton Manning and Emmanuel Sanders, have amplified its visibility.

Mental health conditions frequently emerge during adolescence and early adulthood — yet support systems, conversations, and awareness remain woefully underdeveloped in schools and colleges. According to Brett Curtis, Director of Community Fundraising at Active Minds, the campaign couldn’t have come at a more important time.

“Seventy percent of youth and young adults don’t know how to talk to a friend about mental health,” Curtis explains. “That’s a huge barrier. But when students lead these kinds of initiatives, it becomes more relatable, and people start opening up.”

Data from the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) shows that one in five adults in the United States lives with a mental health condition. Among teens and young adults, the rates of anxiety, depression, and suicidal ideation have sharply increased in recent years, intensified by the pandemic, social media pressures, and societal instability.

By giving youth a platform to lead the conversation — instead of just being the focus of it — the #SpeakYourMIND challenge is helping shift the culture of silence to one of empathy and openness.

The campaign’s virality is evident in its geographic spread. From South Carolina to Maryland to Denmark, participants are posting their videos with the hashtag #uscmind. Interestingly, the acronym “USC” has caused some amusing confusion online, with many assuming the campaign originated at the University of Southern California. In reality, it is Columbia, South Carolina, where this student-led movement first took shape.

This international visibility mirrors the widespread attention that the original Ice Bucket Challenge received in 2014. That version saw everyone from Oprah Winfrey to Bill Gates to President George W. Bush taking part, with the funds benefiting the ALS Association.

The ALS Association has now extended its support to the mental health initiative, acknowledging the power of viral philanthropy to mobilize change, regardless of the cause. “The format worked once to bring awareness to a little-known disease,” said a representative from ALSA. “There’s no reason it can’t work again — this time for mental health.”

While the icy splash garners attention, organizers like Curtis stress that the heart of the campaign goes deeper than donations. “This isn’t about how much money you can give or how many likes your video gets,” he says. “It’s about making mental health a normal part of everyday conversations just like physical health.”

When the World Health Organization (WHO) officially pronounced COVID-19 a pandemic on March 11, 2020, it signaled the start of an unprecedented public health crisis that would redefine societies globally. Since SARS-CoV-2 first appeared years ago, developments with vaccines, treatments and public knowledge generated optimism that the virus would fade into endemicity.

By the early part of 2025, India's daily cases and hospitalizations had fallen to negligible numbers, and societies were able to creep back to near-normal ways of life. But as India heads into the summer of 2025, a sharp rise in cases in several states—from Kerala to Delhi, Karnataka to Chandigarh—came as a rude reminder that the pandemic was far from over.

In urban and semi-urban hubs, outpatient departments (OPDs) are seeing patient volumes three to four times greater than two weeks ago. In large hospitals in Bengaluru, Belagavi, and elsewhere, doctors say lines spill into waiting rooms as people with mild to moderate illness line up for tests and consultation. Intensive-care units are still relatively unaffected, but increasing OPD traffic indicates a key public-health issue: controlling diffuse, low-severity illness without swamping primary health-care facilities

New Covid Symptoms

In contrast to earlier waves, where loss of taste and smell were the hallmark clinical presentation, current infections present mainly in the upper respiratory and GI tracts. Clinicians observe that patients typically present with:

Hoarseness and Throat Pain: A sore, strained voice often preceding or following sore throat.

Low-grade Persistent Fever: Temperature ranging around 100–101°F for two to three days.

Gastrointestinal Distress: Painless, watery diarrhoea of 24–48 hours duration, often followed by profound lethargy that can last weeks after infection.

Mild Stomach Cramps and Fatigue: Intermittent abdominal aching accompanied by extreme tiredness.

Even if these symptoms themselves are usually mild, their unusual combination can result in misdiagnosis or delayed testing—especially in areas where influenza-like illnesses (ILI) and severe acute respiratory infections (SARI) are still endemic

Decoding the Variants Behind the Surge

Indian SARS-CoV-2 Genomics Consortium (INSACOG) genomic surveillance identifies the rise as due to a number of Omicron sublineages—mainly JN.1, NB.1.8.1 and LF.7. These have been listed by WHO as "Variants Under Monitoring" and have mutations that increase transmissibility while retaining largely mild clinical profiles.

Early evidence implies that NB.1.8.1's spike-protein mutations might bestow enhanced immune evasion and cell-binding competence, although no unequivocal connection to increased severity has been found. As the push for sequencing grows stronger, public-health officials hope to track the geographic distribution of each subvariant to inform focused interventions.

Who's at Maximum Risk?

Healthy adults recover within days, but some remain susceptible:

Older Adults (65+ years): Immune senescence can delay viral clearance and complicate comorbidities.

Individuals with Chronic Illnesses: Diabetes, hypertension and chronic respiratory illnesses raise the risk for complications.

Immunocompromised Persons: From transplant recipients to those taking long-term corticosteroids, suppression of the immune system can impede both vaccine efficacy and natural healing.

Young Children: Though uncommon, some instances in infants and toddlers occasionally need hospital observation for hydration issues.

In Chandigarh, a 40-year-old man with no history of health problems died of acute cardiorespiratory arrest almost immediately after returning a positive result—highlighting the virus's erratic course in vulnerable hosts

Both national and state authorities have ramped up testing, contact tracing and isolation measures. In Karnataka, Karnataka Health Department made mask wearing compulsory again in health-care institutions and redirected isolation beds in district hospitals. West Bengal's latest advisory makes it mandatory for private hospitals and labs to report positive cases of the day in a standardized format and store samples for sequencing, a sign of sharpened alertness after an extended period of complacency

Parallelly, the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare is assessing vaccine inventories and examining precautionary booster campaigns for high-risk groups. Top pulmonologists and infectious-disease specialists advise against across-the-board booster drives, referring to prevailing evidence that existing vaccine regimens still provide strong protection against severe disease—despite surfacing subvariants.

What Kind of Prevention Can Be Done At A Personal Level?

Since COVID-19 and other ILIs blur together so indistinctly, experts recommend that the public embrace commonsense practices:

Test Early: Get RT-PCR or rapid-antigen testing when symptoms first appear, such as hoarseness or diarrhoea.

Isolate Early: Stay home for at least five days after symptom onset or after becoming negative through testing.

Practice Mask Discipline: Wear good-fitting masks—especially in crowded or poorly ventilated indoor areas.

Prioritise Hygiene: Proper hand hygiene and surface disinfection cut down on SARS-CoV-2 and other pathogens' transmission equally.

Stay Hydrated and Rested: Proper fluid intake and rest promote immune strength and counter fatigue.

While the clinical impact of the latest wave seems contained, its spread so quickly reflects the ongoing threat of viral evolution. With the world and regional health systems preparing for a possible surge in influenza and other respiratory viruses later in the year, an interlinked surveillance strategy—capitalizing on genomic information, syndromic reporting and vaccination data—will be essential.

Last week, the US Health and Human Services Department's Secretary Robert F Kennedy Jr released a 69-page long 'Make American Healthy Again' (MAHA) report revealing the health priorities of the state. The report was said to guide health policies during the remining of President Trump's term.

While the report has noted some essential points like chemical safety in food, results of physical inactivity and over medication, the report has also been criticised for its anti-vaccination stance. The report called for a heightened scrutiny of childhood vaccine schedule. In fact, recently the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has removed COVID-19 vaccine recommendation for kids and pregnant women.

Amid this, the White House has acknowledged the report, however, it has also acknowledged the errors the report has and has said to fix them.

While RFK says his MAHA Report harnesses 'gold standard' science and it has cited more than 500 studies. The NOTUS has found that some of the cited sources do not exist at all.

The White House press Secretary Karoline Leavitt informed that the report will be updated. “I understand there was some formatting issues with the MAHA report that are being addressed and the report will be updated.” Leavitt told reporters during her briefing. “But it does not negate the substance of the report, which, as you know, is one of the most transformative health reports that has ever been released by the federal government. This is also reported on NOTUS website and as reported by US News.

What Are The Discrepancies?

The NOTUS, on Thursday reported that seven of the more than 500 studies cited in the report did not appear to have been published.

In fact, author of one study confirmed that while she did conduct research on topic of anxiety in children, she never authored the report which had been listed in the MAHA report. Other discrepancies include studies being misinterpreted, or problems with citations, especially on the topics around children's screen time, medication use, and anxiety.

RFK, while claimed to bring "radical transparency" and "gold standard" science to public health agencies, he has refused to release details on studies which calls for an increased scrutiny of the childhood vaccine schedule and describes the children to be overmedicated and undernourished.

ALSO READ: RFK's MAHA Report Raises Concerns On American Healthcare

However, Leavitt said that the White House has "complete confidence" in Kennedy.

“Minor citation and formatting errors have been corrected,” HHS Spokesman Andrew Nixon said in an emailed statement. He described the report as a “historic and transformative assessment by the federal government to understand the chronic disease epidemic afflicting our nation's children.”

This is not it, but his report is already stirring concerns not just among the Democrats, but also among Trump loyalists, including farmers, who criticized this report for characterizing the chemicals sprayed on the US crops.

As of now, the report is supposed to be used to develop policy recommendations that will be released later this year.

As the world collectively exhaled a sigh of relief in 2022, thinking the worst of the COVID-19 pandemic had come and gone, a covert crisis stealthily took hundreds of thousands more lives in America. Rather than rebounding toward pre-pandemic levels, U.S. death rates have remained obstinately elevated, accounting for over 1.5 million "missing Americans" during 2022 and 2023—fatalities that could potentially have been avoided if our country had been comparable to other affluent nations on health outcomes. This quiet excess wave of mortality reveals deeply ingrained national shortcomings well beyond the range of any given infectious illness.

Scientists from Boston University and the University of Minnesota analyzed U.S. official death records and those from 21 other high-income countries—Australia, Canada, France, Japan, the United Kingdom, and others—over 43 years from 1980 to 2023. During that period, the U.S. incurred almost 15 million excess deaths against peer nations, which means Americans died at rates much higher than what would be predicted if we followed their lower death trends.

In 1980, the U.S. actually performed better than its contemporaries, saving approximately 42,000 lives. By 1990, it had chalked up about 89,000 excess deaths. The count rose to 355,000 in 2000 and 409,000 in 2010. At the peak of the pandemic, excess deaths ballooned to 1 million in 2020 and 1.1 million in 2021. Even as COVID-19 declined, the U.S. lost 820,000 excess lives in 2022 and 705,000 in 2023.

This long-term trend indicates not a fleeting anomaly but a prolonged public health crisis. "Imagine the lives saved, the grief and trauma prevented, if the U.S. simply performed at the average of our peers," says lead author Jacob Bor, associate professor of Boston University's School of Public Health. "One in every two U.S. deaths before age 65 is probably preventable. Our failure to do something about it is a national scandal.

Are People Under-65 at Higher Risk?

Perhaps the most alarming finding is that in 2023, nearly 46% of deaths among Americans under 65 could have been prevented were our mortality rates on par with other high-income nations. In a country that prides itself on medical innovation and economic prowess, young and middle-aged adults are dying from conditions that, elsewhere, are managed far more effectively.

An important proportion of these deaths are motivated by deep-seated noncommunicable and social-environmental causes: drug overdoses, firearms violence, motor vehicle crashes, and avoidable cardiometabolic disease. "These trends preceded the pandemic and went unstopped thereafter," says University of Minnesota's Elizabeth Wrigley-Field. "The 700,000 surplus American deaths in 2023 are precisely what you'd expect from previously increasing trends, even if there'd never been a pandemic."

What Is Reason Behind This Excess Mortality?

1. Substance Use and Overdose

The American overdose epidemic, driven by opioids, methamphetamine, and increasingly by powerful synthetic opioids such as fentanyl, continues to be a major cause of premature mortality. Whereas peer countries have introduced harm-reduction policies—expanded naloxone distribution, supervised injection sites—the United States has grappled with adopting these data-driven policies at scale.

2. Violence and Injury

Homicide and gun-related fatalities have exploded in recent decades. Other rich nations, however, have witnessed declines in violent crime and road traffic deaths due to draconian gun-control policies, safer car regulations, and vigorous road-safety campaigns.

3. Cardiometabolic Disease

Heart disease, diabetes, and obesity are responsible for a significant proportion of preventable deaths. Compounding factors—disproportionate access to medical care, food deserts, and socioeconomic inequalities—exacerbate these conditions among vulnerable groups.

Why the U.S. Lags Behind?

Senior researcher Andrew Stokes refers to the stark policy distinctions: "Other nations demonstrate that investing in universal health care, robust safety nets, and evidence-based public health policies results in longer, healthier lives." The U.S., however, has:

Fragmented Healthcare: Close to 30 million Americans lack insurance, and millions more underinsured, with obstacles to preventive health care and management of chronic diseases.

Weak Social Safety Nets: Family pay leave, unemployment benefits, and poverty assistance in the United States are far behind those in Europe, Canada, and Australia.

Political Polarization: Government distrust and partisan gridlock have interfered with coordinated actions to deal with health crises, ranging from overdose response to pandemic readiness.

Even worse, the planned federal reductions to Medicare, Medicaid, and public health funding could further expand the gap. The recently House-approved legislation, as part of a possible second Trump administration agenda, would contract health programs at the very time that strong support is needed more than ever. "Severe reductions to public health, safety net programs, and federal health data could result in a further expansion of health disparities—and increasing numbers of excess—and entirely preventable—deaths," warns Bor.

Reversing America's Excess Death Crisis

In spite of the grim fact of excess mortality in America, solutions are not new nor out of reach. Other nations, such as Canada, the U.K., and France, have shown that universal healthcare, be it through single-payer or hybrid models, can provide near-universal coverage for primary and preventive care. This kind of complete coverage greatly reduces deaths from treatable causes, which serves as a reminder of the value in a system emphasizing early intervention over crisis management.

Equally, harm reduction strategies have been strikingly effective in nations like Australia and a number of European countries. In these nations, there has been increased access to addiction treatment, overdose reversal medicines with lifesaving properties, and safe-use centers, which have worked together to decrease overdose death in a noticeable manner. These initiatives are a realistic and humane response to drug use, centering on reducing harm and supporting recovery over punitive policies.

Prevention of injury and violence deaths is yet another critical element. Seat-belt laws, graduated licensing of teenage drivers, and strict gun control have been shown to prevent car accident fatalities and violence caused by guns. These evidence-based and public safety policies provide a clear plan to mitigate avoidable deaths in the United States.

But applying these solutions at home will take political will, institutional capacity, and societal consensus. The cost of not acting has already been staggering more than 1.5 million excess deaths in the last two years alone. If the U.S. keeps on its present course, the numbers could go even higher.

To turn around this trend, America needs to spend significantly on public health infrastructure. Disease surveillance should be made stronger, data need to be made more transparent, and community health centers should be extended to cover more areas in order to build a more resilient healthcare system. These initiatives not only will ready the country for crises ahead but also improve daily health outcomes.

Increasing access to care is also paramount. Progress toward universal coverage—or at least the removal of financial obstacles that keep individuals from accessing timely preventive and primary care—could have an enormous impact on decreasing early death. Healthcare access should be a right tied neither to employment nor income but to basic human needs.

In addition, adopting evidence-based policies must become the standard rather than the exception. Harm reduction, injury prevention, and targeted interventions for chronic illnesses like heart disease and diabetes must be prioritized. These are not radical ideas; they are proven strategies with measurable success rates in comparable countries.

As Bor insists, “We have the tools and the knowledge. What we lack is the collective resolve to act.”

The 1.5 million lives lost in 2022 and 2023 are not mere statistics—they are mothers, fathers, siblings, and friends whose deaths were avoidable. While the pandemic was a tragic catalyst, the underlying causes of excess mortality run much deeper than any single virus. Confronting this crisis requires acknowledging that America’s health system and social policies have long failed to protect large swaths of its population.

Ultimately, catching up to, or exceeding, the health achievements of our peer nations is not only a matter of national pride or global reputation. It is a moral obligation, requiring us to deploy science, policy, and empathy to ensure that the next generation of Americans lives longer, healthier lives.