December 2016

We’re all familiar with the notion of psychological trauma — damage to an individual’s psyche caused by an extremely distressing event. But there’s also another kind of trauma: a collective disturbance that happens to a group of people when their world is suddenly upended. Consider the Buffalo Creek flood of 1972. In Buffalo Creek, a mountain hollow in West Virginia, a coal-mining company had deposited more than a million gallons of wastewater and sludge, checked by a rudimentary dam. Rain...

About 18 months ago, Anita Vaughn of Baptist Memorial Hospital for Women and Marlon Foster of Knowledge Quest wrote a column on behalf of the ACE Awareness Foundation—and made a promise. They pledged that Shelby County would become a statewide and national example of how a communitywide alliance of families, educators, faith leaders, business leaders, nonprofit managers, elected officials, law enforcement and healthcare providers can transform a community by preventing adverse childhood...

Across the metropolises of the United States, the middle class is shrinking. In 9 out of every 10 cities, the share of adults living in middle-income households has fallen. It’s an ongoing phenomenon that’s a key factor in dividing the nation between the rich and poor. When you zoom into some of the most populous cities with some of the highest income gaps, as mapping-software company Esri did in a new interactive project, “Wealth Divides,” the geography of where the poor and rich live, and...

Lifelong health is determined by more than just our genes: experiences at sensitive periods of development change the brain in ways that increase or decrease risk for later physical and mental illness, including addiction. That finding is the premise of the Brain Story, which puts scientific concepts into a narrative that is salient to both expert and non-expert audiences. The Brain Story synthesizes decades of research and reflects a body of knowledge that experts agree is useful for policy...

Teaching used to be known as the noblest profession. Today, not so much. It’s often depicted in terms of overwork, low pay, and overall disrespect. Small wonder, then, that young people are turning away from a future in education. According to a survey published by the Chronicle of Higher Education , in 2015, only 4 percent of college freshmen said they were likely to major in education, down from 11 percent in 2000. A research brief published in September by the Learning Policy Institute...

The Trauma and Learning Policy Initiative has made this excellent 11 minute video available for sharing widely. All children need safe and supportive environments in order to learn. The Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACE) study demonstrates that nearly every school has students who have been exposed to overwhelming experiences, such as witnessing violence at home, being direct targets of abuse, homelessness or having a parent with substance abuse or mental health issues. For some children...

It’s no wonder criminal-justice reformers woke up from Election Day 2016 with a sense of existential gloom. Given candidate Donald J. Trump’s law-and-order bluster, his dystopian portrayal of rising crime and an ostensible war on the police, and a posse of advisers who think the main problem with incarceration is that we don’t do enough of it, the idea that justice reformers have anything to look forward to is at best counterintuitive. It is reasonable to expect that President Trump and his...

The standard definition of drug or alcohol addiction is that it's a chronic, incurable disease of the brain. In a comprehensive report on the topic, published last month, the surgeon general gives this familiar definition a more positive spin. He eschews the "cure" word and focuses instead on the fact that, as with other chronic diseases such as diabetes, there are effective treatments. There are methods for managing and reducing symptoms. The surgeon general's report takes pains to note...

For many children, December often is linked to presents and excitement, but when a young child doesn’t seem all that enthused about getting gifts, it could be a sign that something is wrong. Measuring brain waves, researchers at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis have found that clinically depressed children don’t respond to rewards the same way as other children do. Previous research from the same group of scientists found that a reduced ability to experience joy is a key...

Mindfulness – the practice of attending to thoughts and feelings in the present moment – has been the focus of a lot of research attention recently and even under the full glare of science, it just keeps getting better. In the first ever large scale study of its kind, researchers explored whether teaching people mindfulness would be as effective as maintenance doses of antidepressants in managing relapse in depression. According to Willem Kuyken, lead author of the study and Professor of...

In the sweltering days of July, tensions between police and civilians were running high. A cop fatally shot Alton Sterling in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, setting off a week of protests. Another police officer fatally shot Philando Castile in a suburb of St. Paul, Minnesota, while his fiance and her 4-year-old daughter watched. A sniper shot and killed five police officers in Dallas. But inside a Disneyland convention center in Anaheim, California, almost 700 law enforcement officers and security...

The first anti-bullying project took place more than 30 years ago in Scandinavia. Since then, projects have cropped up around the world, mostly taking a similar overall approach: raising awareness of bullying and getting students to engage in activities that highlight its negative effects. By 2004, enough anti-bullying projects had been introduced in enough places to review their overall impact, including some meta-analyses of their results. Unfortunately, the evidence about their success...