February 2017

In 1985, Ala Sarraj went to sleep in Damascus and dreamed of a big yellow door nearly 300 kilometers away, in Palmyra. He was 22 and one of the top-ranked students in Syria, studying medicine at the prestigious Damascus University. In the dream, the door’s outlines were vague, its color diluted by hints of gray. The grinding and screaming of torture could be heard behind it. Ala would dream again of the door after his older brother, Abdul Rahman, fled Syria for Chicago that same year; again...

Whether a woman’s estrogen level is high or low could determine if she may be susceptible to developing post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) , according to recent research. Estrogen has been found to epigenetically change gene activity in the brain and could even protect a woman from emotional numbness, flashbacks, and difficulty sleeping – all symptoms of PTSD – after a shocking or traumatic situation. Researchers analyzed an epigenetic mark called DNA methylation , which is known to turn...

Our ability to move to opportunity—our mobility—is a key factor in our own and our nation’s economic success. But the mobility of Americans has reached record lows, according the latest data from the U.S. Census. Just slightly more than one in ten Americans (11.2 percent) moved between 2015 and 2016, almost half the 20.2 percent rate back in 1948, when the Census began tracking American mobility. Mobility was once the cornerstone of the American Dream, but today Americans move less often...

I'm new to the ACEs Connection and therefore find myself reading many of the post to sort of catch up. Much focus is on the necessity to recognize the impact that ACE has had on our children and then seek ways to effectively intervene. This must continue. I continue to believe that in order to get ahead of this problem we must make parenting education a priority within our school systems. Most of our schools staff Family Consumer Science teachers that offer courses like parenting and child...

Recent events provide renewed opportunities to ensure the safety of American Muslim youth: There are several actions adults can take to help Muslim young people feel safe, valued and affirmed As people across the United States continue to respond to the executive order on immigration signed by President Trump on January 27, it’s important to keep in mind ways that these reactions may affect the safety and well-being of Muslim youth across the country. There are about 3.3 million Muslims...

It’s official: in the United States we have a new president. Along with it, lots of questions … for me, mostly unanswered questions which bring about uncertainty, triggers my past traumatic events, and my anxiety begins to flare up. I’ve have mostly tried to ignore the coverage, but you almost have to have your head in the sand to not hear some of what is going on. But every time something gets through my “no news for the moment” safeguards, I find myself asking the same question, “What does...

In a low-key interview in 2015, the Education Secretary-nominee and billionaire school-choice advocate Betsy DeVos laid out the game plan for the movement going forward. It was a familiar playbook—charter schools, online schools, and blended learning—to which DeVos added something of her own: DeVos supports all of those things, she said, plus “any combination, or any kind of choice that hasn’t yet been thought of.” While DeVos has since said that she wouldn’t push for a federal voucher...

Across the United States, 34-year-old women, on average, make between 10 and 18 percent less than 34-year-old men. That gap isn’t surprising—it’s actually been slowly improving in recent years. What’s striking is that, when you only consider Ivy League graduates, the gap is significantly wider. This wage disparity came to light in a study by The Equal Opportunity Project, recently featured in The New York Times, that focused primarily on socioeconomic inequality. The study showed that female...

Setting the Stage for Peer Support Services I was asked to write something about “best practices” when working with peers in clinical settings. What follows is a short history designed to give you some idea about how I formed my opinions on this topic. When I moved to Oregon in 1991, I left a Boston metro area community mental health agency where I was the Director of Crisis Services. Literally as I was leaving, peers were ceremoniously evicting the agency clinical staff from their offices...

The 2016 Arizona Youth Survey was conducted by the Arizona Criminal Justice Commission in collaboration with Arizona State University’s Morrison Institute for Public Policy and NORC at the University of Chicago. The survey is primarily intended to assess health-risk behavior and measure the prevalence of substance use and other behaviors such as bullying, violence and gambling among Arizona’s eighth-, 10th- and 12th-graders. More than 57,000 students from all 15 counties in the state took...

Reducing the stigma associated with opiate addiction is critical to the willingness of a person to access treatment. Emilie van Eeghen, the vice president for behavioral health at MaineGeneral Medical Center in Augusta, shared that message with more than 100 people during the United Way of Kennebec Valley’s annual breakfast Thursday morning. Van Eeghen said recovery is possible and resources are available to those in need. “Stigma contributes toward the difficulty (an addicted person) has in...

There can be a lot to worry about when it comes to our careers. Anxiety can arise from toxic co-workers, unstable working conditions, financial uncertainty, and distress about not performing up to par. Some anxiety is healthy and keeps us motivated, but if anxiety becomes persistent and excessive it can disrupt our daily performance and our overall quality of life. [For more of this story, written by Joe Wilner, go to ...