According to the Centers for Disease Control, suicide is the second leading cause of death among youth ages 11 to 18 in the United States. The strongest risk factors for suicide in youth are depression and substance abuse. Alarmingly, 80 percent of...
Today I was thinking about a conversation I had years ago when I was just learning to cover national politics. I had arranged to have lunch with a well-known Republican political operative, who had just come off a string of election victories;...
Recently a neighborhood in Brooklyn made national headlines for a fight over public schools. Lots of affluent, mainly white families have been moving into new condos in the waterfront area called DUMBO, and the local elementary school is...
I had the awesome experience of co-facilitating the Beyond Trauma: Building a Resilient Sacramento workshop with many of those championing the work in our community. The energy of the workshop planners -- Gail Kennedy and Donielle...
The Sacramento County Student Mental Health & Wellness Collaborative hosted a presentation by Dr Nancy Erbstein, UC Davis Department of Human Ecology and Sergio Cuellar, UC Davis Center for Regional Change on the uses of PUTTING YOUTH ON THE MAP online applications. ( http://interact.regionalchange...edu/youth/index.html Putting Youth on the Map (PYOM) is a powerful information resource for youth and adults working to ensure youth well-being in California. Who can use...
In a column for The New York Times this past January, Nicholas Kristof lamented what he called the country’s “empathy gap,” imploring his readers to grasp the complex circumstances that could plunge...
When the Places for People outreach team found Chandra Thirdkill, she was about 40 years old and had been homeless for two years. Her struggles, however, began as a teen. Everyone looked at her like she was ugly, she thought. No one liked her. She...
A study reveals that an astonishing number of fathers – 13% – experience depressive symptoms during their partner’s pregnancy . Astonishing because I had imagined it would be considerably higher. Very little research has...
Guillermo’s family home sat on a hill in San Salvador. The houses there stood crowded, stacked one upon another with rusted metal roofs, and some nights Guillermo could stand atop the hill and look across the valley of dark buildings to...
Early on a Wednesday morning, I heard an anguished cry—then silence. I rushed into the bedroom and watched my wife, Rachel, stumble from the bathroom, doubled over, hugging herself in pain. “Something’s wrong,” she...
"My name is Fernando M and I currently attend Hanna Boys Center in Sonoma, California. Before coming here I was labeled a troubled young man. I came from a bad neighborhood in Los Angeles. I never had a stable household because my mom...
I grew up around the corner from Walter Reed Army Medical Center, in Washington, D.C., which housed the small but remarkable National Museum of Health and Medicine. The musty place hosted a steady rotation of surreal exhibits—conjoined...
In his quiet, modest way, Glenn was proud of his robot. It was 1974, at a local high school science fair in Boca Raton, Florida, and Glenn, a 15-year-old sophomore, had spent months painstakingly constructing a jumble of wires and circuits...
Near the end of the school day Wednesday, students at the Tuolumne Learning Center played guitars, talked among themselves and asked polite and curious questions to a class visitor. Laptop computers were closed on their desks and books were neatly put...
When a young Kurdish man hosted in a temporary reception center in Milan started swiping through some pictures on his phone, one of the center's staff members was shocked by what he saw. An image of a man hanging by his neck appeared on the...