October 2018

Months after appointing its first minister for loneliness, Britain named a minister for suicide prevention as part of a new push to tackle mental health issues. Prime Minister Theresa May on Wednesday announced the appointment of the health minister Jackie Doyle-Price to the new role. She will lead government efforts to cut the number of suicides and overcome the stigma that prevents people with mental health problems from seeking help. While suicide rates have dropped in recent years, about...

Consider, for a moment , this story I recently discovered in court transcripts. A paternal grandmother living in New York City learns that her 1-year-old grandson is in Michigan’s foster care system. Days after the child’s removal, she immediately contacts the child’s foster care worker, travels to Michigan, attends the court hearing and requests that the child be placed with her, instead of strangers. It turns out that she raised the child for the first few months of his life, and the...

There’s a small burst of air that explodes from every clap. And when hundreds of people are clapping in unison, it begins to feel like a breeze—one that was pulsing through the Phelps Stokes Chapel at Berea College in Kentucky. The students and staff that had gathered here were stomping, clapping, and singing along, as they were led in a rendition of the Civil Rights era anthem, “Ain’t Gonna Let Nobody Turn Me Around.” They had packed into the wood-framed building for a convocation address,...

This newsletter is about listening to those with lived experience. So what is lived experience? For us at Trauma Informed Oregon (TIO), lived experience means you have personal experience in what you are talking about. As you will see in the blogs, firsthand experience can be as a service recipient, a provider, and a survivor. Trauma informed care (TIC) calls out the need to include the voices of those with lived experience, but why? The intention is simple—we will be more effective and...

It began with the mesmerizing spectacle of dominoes falling: Harvey Weinstein, Kevin Spacey, Louis C.K., Charlie Rose, Matt Lauer, Russell Simmons, and so on, name after famous face, all disgraced by the end of November, 2017. An autumn later, #MeToo is undergoing a shift. Perhaps this is the moment that #MeToo stops being a movement aimed primarily at punishing individuals and starts to do its work on the institutions that have enabled them. The institutions do not collapse into...

Today, it was my third patient of the morning: a woman with a history of childhood sexual abuse and an abusive marriage. She shared with me her distress, her escalating nightmares and flashbacks over the past week. She held out her left arm to me, where for the first time since her adolescence, she had started cutting herself. And then my sixth patient struggled unsuccessfully to tolerate a Pap smear, as her anxiety became unbearable. Yesterday, it was my fourth patient, with a history of...

The youngest child to come before the bench in federal immigration courtroom No. 14 was so small she had to be lifted into the chair. Even the judge in her black robes breathed a soft “aww” as her latest case perched on the brown leather. Her feet stuck out from the seat in small gray sneakers, her legs too short to dangle. Her fists were stuffed under her knees. As soon as the caseworker who had sat her there turned to go, she let out a whimper that rose to a thin howl, her crumpled face a...

Los Angeles County supervisors voted Tuesday to stop collecting fees once charged to families of juvenile delinquents for their incarceration, ending a practice decried by criminal justice advocates as an unfair tax on minorities and an ineffective means of rehabilitating young people who commit crimes. The motion, sponsored by Supervisors Hilda Solis and Janice Hahn, directs the county’s Probation Department to stop accepting payment and cancel nearly $90 million in juvenile detention fees...

The consequences of sexual assault fall overwhelmingly on the victims. About 0.7 percent of rapes and attempted rapes end with a felony conviction for the perpetrator, according to an estimate based on the best of the imperfect measures available. On the other side of the incident, at least 89 percent of victims report some level of distress, including high rates of physical injury, post-traumatic stress disorder, depression, anxiety and substance abuse. [For more on this story by Andrew Van...

Imagine a small, developing nation whose education system is severely lacking: schools are poorly funded, students can't afford tuition or books, fewer than half of indigenous girls even attend school — and often drop out to take care of siblings or get married. These are the schools of rural Guatemala. Now meet a firebrand educator who thinks he has a way to reinvent schools in Guatemala. [For more on this story by JOHN BURNETT, go to...

Let’s make this an easy assignment: We believe that America can take a huge step forward with the prevention of ACEs and trauma by helping school boards develop ACEs policy. This policy would articulate how a school identifies students with trauma due to ACEs and provides the help they and their parents need. The policy would also educate all school staff about ACEs and create a trauma-informed learning environment. Some readers might be thinking, “School boards are not ready to take on ACEs...

I asked @Robin M Cogan to share some about why and how she has hosted community cafes in New Jersey. I'm sharing this now because there are so many fabulous documentaries available (and more coming out all of the time). Community cafes, based on the world cafe model, are great to have after a shared a movie experience. Some of us come alive in front of a huge crowd, and some of us find meeting facilitation or group discussions a little daunting. Whatever camp you might be in,...