October 2022

By Hallie Golden, Photo: Mad River Brewing Company, The Guardian, October 23, 2022 T hese days, you’ll see them sprinkled across Oracle Park, the stadium of the San Francisco Giants: bright blue cans with images of a steelhead fish flapping above a waterway, a deer with its head to the ground or a dam in the Klamath River. The cans are produced by the Mad River Brewing Company, owned by the largest federally recognized Indigenous nation in California , the Yurok Tribe. And in April, they...

While the process of forgiving painful offenses from childhood can be very difficult, efforts to forgive bring great rewards. The process begins with acknowledging the pain, applying self-compassion, and taking even small and faltering steps to get the forgiveness ball rolling.

As a clinician, researcher and policy specialist devoted to the prevention and treatment of the ill effects of child abuse and neglect (CAN), I read “Recommendations for Population-Based Applications of the Adverse Childhood Experiences Study: Position Statement by the American College of Preventive Medicine”, a position statement by the American College of Preventive medicine, with dismay . (Sherin KM, Stillerman A, Chandrasekar L, Went N, Niebuhr DW. Recommendations for Population-Based...

Covid. I am so over it. It's been two and a half long years. I'm done. I'm tired. I'm exhausted. I am fed up. I am still scared. I am shocked and surprised. How many more feeling words can I find to talk about Covid? Somebody asked the other day, "Can we be grieving because of Covid?" Absolutely, yes. For all of us, grief is the normal and natural response to change or loss of any kind. Over these two and a half years, we've experienced a lot of change, and most of it was not our own making.

Hope is different than optimism. It’s better. If you’ve been following my posts lately, I’ve been discussing how hope (as measured using the Adult Hope Scale) acts a personal resource against burnout, low job satisfaction, and PTSD, for example. For most people, the science of hope is a new concept. We use hope as if it were a wish - “I hope it doesn’t rain” or “I hope you’re feeling better.” Nice sentiments, but not much else because you don’t have control over a wish. In essence, you’re...

By Quil Lawrence, Photo: John J. Kruzel/Department of Defense, National Public Radio, October 20, 2022 William Dabney never liked to talk much about his time fighting in World War II. "He didn't keep his uniform or any of those things. In other words, he was through with the service," says Beulah Dabney, who married him in 1951. It wasn't just the horrors of war — which he had seen up close at Omaha Beach in France on D-Day. What bothered Dabney was the treatment he and his fellow Black...

By Rachel Bluth, Photo: Irfan Khan/The Los Angeles Times/Getty Images, California Healthline, October 20, 2022 A class of health care facility support staff, including nursing assistants, security guards, and janitors, has worked alongside doctors and nurses throughout the covid-19 pandemic keeping patients and medical buildings safe and clean. It’s an unassuming line of work that some people consider a calling. Tony Ramirez, 39, a critical care technician at Garfield Medical Center in...

By David Smith, Photo: Peacock, The Guardian, October 20, 2022 To Tell the Truth is a long-running TV show in which a panel of celebrities is presented with three contestants who all claim to be the same person with an unusual occupation of experience. The panel grills each of them and must decide which two are imposters and which one is telling the truth about their identity. In 1980, three bespectacled African American women appeared on the show , each stating: “My name is Rosa Parks.”...

Is there such a thing as false hope? Recently, a friend suggested that the Peanuts comic strip hero, Charlie Brown, had a high level of false hope because Lucy kept pulling the football away at the last minute. I disagreed. I suggested Charlie Brown didn’t have false hope, he was simply overly optimistic because he put his success in Lucy’s hands when he should have sought a new pathway around the barrier (i.e., Lucy). Of course, Charlie Brown may also be a low-hope person because he didn’t...

PACEs Connection is pleased and grateful to announce Hilary Marine as our Fall Graduate Intern. She joins us this fall for an internship as part of her journey to earn her Master of Public Health! Learn a bit more about Hilary and her work below: What made you want to intern with PACEs Connection? What makes a person resilient through adversities has fascinated me for a long time. Many children encounter adverse experiences, yet the outcomes can be vastly different. Aside from all of this,...

Our World Mental Health Day episode is a conversation with Philip Butler, Ph.D., about the future of mental health care: one that puts healing in each person's own hands. We talk about the barriers to accessing healing and mental health care, especially for Black people. Dr. Butler's solution is to put the Internal Family Systems therapy methodology in everyone's hands through his Seekr Bot app so that we can access healing anytime anywhere. “The Seekr Project is part of a larger plan to...