January 2016

You know the typical holiday storyline: Depression and suicide rates peak during the holidays. Actually, though, people suffering from depression tend to be fine during the holidays. Their struggles come later, after the festivities are over. In Sonoma County, the influx of calls begins just as the holidays end and continues through March, according to sources at the North Bay Suicide Prevention Hotline and Sonoma County’s National Alliance on Mental Illness office. Telephone...

Social isolation is bad for your health . In fact, even living alone increases your risk of illness and death by about 20 percent, and a lack of friends or strong family ties ups your risk by half. Now, researchers  have found, social isolation early in life can have substantial lasting impacts on health. "Full social participation is such a fundamental human need that research since the 1900s has found the lack of social connections increases the odds of death by at least 50%,"...

From screen-breaks to mindfulness sessions, there’s a lot more teachers could be doing to support their own and their pupils’ wellbeing, writes the mental health champion for schools The art of tackling mental health issues can broadly be divided into three strands: Prevention Creating environments and encouraging individuals to practice habits which have been shown to be conducive to good mental health. First Aid Recognising the early stages of mental distress and minimising...

The success or failure of a farming operation depends hugely on the vagaries of weather and climate. For a farmer, a single intense rain event or prolonged dry period can mean a year of lost crops and income. Climate change is expected to make the line between success and failure even more tenuous for farmers in the future. And this uncertainty about growing conditions is having a noticeable impact on farmers’ mental health, according to a recent study out of Australia’s Murdoch...

The first-grader was shuffling through his school papers when he stumbled across it: the test he had been taking last month when he got so angry that he had punched another student in the face.     In an ordinary classroom, the memories evoked by the finding could have triggered another outburst, furthering the damage while distracting the teacher and class.     The boy was in no ordinary classroom on this recent afternoon, however. He was in a special Spring Branch...

H ow do you make a film about loneliness that isn’t bleak and despairing? It’s hugely important subject, and it’s reaching such epidemic proportions in Britain that I knew I had to make a film . And somehow make a film people would watch – and not run away from. [For more of this story, written by Sue Bourne, go to http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/jan/04/10-reasons-people-lonely-the-age-of-loneliness]

These tiny, hungry birds remind me of our children. So open and anxious to be nourished and cared for. Cared about. Inspired by tiny birds and little children I have developed programs to feed these little minds and hearts.  Please let me help your kids too. In the picture your see four little birds but there are five. One is hidden inside an egg, soon to hatch. We must be careful not to miss even one of our little ones.

When U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan stepped down last week after seven years on the job, he didn't talk about test scores or teacher quality. Rather, fighting back tears, he used the opportunity to talk about what he called the "greatest frustration" of his tenure — Washington not passing gun control legislation. "If I can leave you one number: 16,000. That in my first six years as Secretary of Education that's the number of young people who are killed across our...

Leaning over their kitchen table, Xavier Johnson, 12, and his brother, DaShawn, 9, grinned shyly as they fanned out dozens of drawings in crayon, pencil, and marker. DaShawn proudly smoothed a picture of a dragon composed of panels in red, green, blue, and black, each color representing an emotion. Xavier held up renderings of athletes, of his family, of an alien robot. “Drawing makes me feel better,” Xavier said. “When I’m mad, I draw my anger, and I just get...

At some point during the first session of Professor Steve Herbert’s seminar course on law, societies and justice this fall, a change worked its way over those sitting in the beige meeting room being used as a classroom. The 11 University of Washington students began to realize that their fellow students — 10 prisoners serving time in the Washington State Reformatory — were every bit as prepared for the class as they were. Maybe more so. [For more of this story, written by...

Dr. Daryl Steiner’s colleagues at Akron Children’s Hospital have called him a pioneer and a visionary in the field of child abuse evaluation and treatment. Steiner’s more humble than that, though. “As I look back over my career, I can see we’ve done a good job,” Steiner said in a conference room in the hospital’s Locust Building, where he heads the Children at Risk Evaluation (CARE) Center. “The best thing I did was hire good people.”...

Leonard Strickland’s barbaric and unnecessary death at the hands of prison guards at the Clinton Correctional Facility in upstate New York highlights the need for independent oversight of the state’s prisons. His beating in 2010, the details of which have only recently come to light, is the latest in a long list of instances of brutality toward inmates in New York’s prison system. The state’s inhumane practices involving solitary confinement have also generated...