December 2015

Divorce, neglect, emotional or physical abuse, poverty, all instances of Adverse Childhood Experiences, or ACE. It is  a term defined by the CDC and linked not only to trauma as a child, but profound effects on your health and well-being as an adult. Experts also say it further indication we need to be mindful of the situations we are creating for our children, not only for their benefit and care now, but for their future. "The research again culminated in an awareness that trauma...

Mass shootings and police shootings have spurred calls for authorities to take action to reduce the violence. But policymakers may be stymied by the dearth of public health research into both gun violence and deaths that involve the police. One big obstacle: congressional restrictions on funding of such research at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Right now, the CDC studies all kinds of violence. There's a program on child abuse and youth violence, and the public health agency...

In a brick plaza next to the Chelsea, Massachusetts city hall, Anthony, a bald but still-youthful man in grey sweats, tells me he spent the previous night in the hospital for what he says was his twelfth overdose. Anthony and other users of illegal drugs agreed to speak to NPR for this story on the condition that we use only their first names. He blames his overdose on what his dealer told him was a particularly strong bag of heroin laced with the anesthesia drug fentanyl — or...

If you pull into Hertford County High School in northeastern North Carolina, pass the bus circle and the soccer fields, and continue to a patch of woods, you find three, cheerful, two-story apartment buildings. Knock on any door here and you'll find the home of a teacher or employee of the local school district. North Carolina has some of the lowest teacher salaries in the country. Combine that with a housing shortage in this rural county, and that creates a big problem. So local leaders...

How stressful is medical training? So bad that in a class that encouraged medical students to express their feelings by drawing comics, nearly half of them depicted their supervisors as monsters, researchers say. Students imagined the workplace as dank dungeons, represented supervising physicians as fiendish, foul-mouthed monsters, and themselves as sleep-deprived zombies walking through barren post-apocalyptic landscapes, the study authors, Daniel R. George and Dr. Michael Green, wrote...

Since 1993, 11 people have been killed in abortion-related attacks—doctors, clinic staff, and, just the other week, a police officer and two visitors in the line of fire at a Planned Parenthood clinic in Colorado Springs. While the investigation continues into the shooter’s background and motives, David Cohen , a law professor at Drexel University, says that stalking and harassment pose a much more common threat to abortion providers and their families. For their May 2015 book...

A National Summit as part of Stepping Up In support of Stepping Up, the National Association of Counties (NACo), the Council of State Governments (CSG) Justice Center, and the American Psychiatric Association Foundation (APA Foundation) are hosting a National Summit on Reducing the Prevalence of Individuals with Mental Illnesses in Jails (National Summit). The National Summit will be held Sunday, April 17, 2016 – Tuesday, April 19, 2016 in Washington, D.C. Funding for the National...

When Henry was laid off three and a half years ago, his family was forced to leave their house. The house they were renting had mold in the basement. Though Lisette was working two part-time jobs, they couldn't find another place to live. [For more of this story go to http://www.upworthy.com/this-is-what-it-looks-like-when-youre-part-of-the-working-poor]

I had seen her walking through the hallways of our high school pulling a wheeled briefcase behind her. She looked like the kind of person you’d want to hug. Not skin and bones where you feel like you might break the person if you squeezed too hard, but round and fleshy with broad shoulders. She wasn’t very tall, but she held her head high, and her hair added a couple of inches. She had it pulled back from her face in a bun that sat at the top of her head, near the back. The bun...

One of the most groundbreaking, critically acclaimed, and delightful video games of 2014 began in a highly unlikely place — Anchorage, Alaska. A scene from "Never Alone." Photos by North One Games/E-Line Media. It's called "Never Alone" (or "Kisima Ingitchuna"). And it wasn't developed by Nintendo, Electronic Arts, Ubisoft, or any of the other big game studios. It was the brainchild of the Cook Inlet Tribal Council (CITC) — a nonprofit community support organization for Alaska...

It's always satisfying when common sense and community-oriented compassion combine to make good public policy. It's particularly satisfying when the policy involves one of the most daunting problems Houston and Harris County face: the nexus between the mentally ill among us and the criminal justice system that often ensnares them. [For more of this story go to http://www.houstonchronicle.com/opinion/editorials/article/Compassionate-care-6676804.php]

The U.S. military ’s historically high suicide rate is more a generational trait than a wartime offshoot, as millennial recruits join up carrying emotional baggage, a new research paper says. The Pentagon says that the group most at risk of committing suicide is white males under 24 years old — which just happens to fit the profile of virtually all enlisted recruits. [For more of this story, written by Rowan Scarborough, go to...