March 2016

A bright red tablecloth adds a pop of color to Ashara Manns' kitchen at her home in Flint, Mich. The substitute teacher is at the stove, where she pours two bottles of water into a stockpot before dumping in big bags of mixed greens. "Normally, I would rinse these with the running water, so hopefully they're still safe," Manns says. Flint residents have been told not to drink or cook with the city's lead-tainted tap water, so Manns and her husband, Bennie, rely on bottled water to prepare...

Rosa Ana Lozada grew up on a two-block-long street in a San Francisco neighborhood pocked with trauma: domestic violence, child abuse, the frequent wail of police sirens. “It was unsafe to walk the two blocks to the bus stop,” she recalled. “In my community, we learned that police officers were not our friends because they were only seen when bad things happened.” For Lozada, now CEO of Harmonium, Inc., and a member of the San Diego Trauma Informed Guide Team, home and family were the...

It was a birth of a different kind with a two-year gestation period. “We are celebrating the birth of The Nest,” said Jenifer Blumberg, executive director, at the open house for The Nest on Thursday, Feb 25. The Nest is a two-level pink colored home with several rooms and three bathrooms that was bought and furnished to give young pregnant women or mothers and their children a cozy place to live to help them succeed in life. Those moms will soon take up residence in the house. The idea for...

Amie Hane, associate professor of psychology, delivered a presentation, “From the Tide Pool to the Stars… and Back Again: Early Caregiving and Human Neurobehavioral Development,” last Thursday as part of the faculty lecture series. Hane is a developmental psychologist who specializes in developmental neuroscience, parent-infant mental health and behavioral pediatrics. She is also a member of the department of pediatrics and psychology at the Columbia University Medical Center, where she...

Teens who believe they are discriminated against in their daily lives — whether because of their race, gender, age or physical size — have higher levels of the stress hormone cortisol, according to a new study by California State University, Northridge child and adolescent development professor Virginia Huynh. Dysregulated cortisol patterns during adolescence can have implication for later adult health and has` been associated with cardiovascular disease and cancer mortality. The health...

Nearly everyone remembers being moody as a teenager, but for some, it can be dangerous. In Jamie Smith's case, she was 17 when the depression she'd been battling took a turn for the worse. It wasn't until a friend accidentally caught Smith attempting suicide in her bedroom that it became clear the young woman was having a problem. "My mom didn't realize it was that bad. We really didn't talk about mental illness in our family," she said. Although Smith had complained of feeling unwell and...

Standing in the warden's office at Pelican Bay, the notorious maximum security prison in Crescent City, California, I don my dark green stab-proof vest and accompany public information officer Lieutenant Christopher Acosta and Associate Warden Rawland Swift (who has since retired) to the Security Housing Unit, or SHU. Acosta is curt and bulldoggish, with a smooth, bald head. Swift is affable and mustachioed, wearing a casual short-sleeved shirt and jeans. "It's been a long week," Swift...

Transgender kids often have it rough. In a world that isn't crazy about people's differences, and often metes out severe consequences for such dissimilarities, trans children can find themselves targets of mental and physical attacks. (In one of the most egregious cases, an 18-year-old agender child was set ablaze on a bus in Oakland , California.) Fortunately, parents can help, basically just by being parents: According to a new study , trans kids whose parents support them in their gender...

“Don’t worry, pregnancy isn’t an illness,” said my midwife, smiling affectionately as I worried about my lack of morning sickness. She must have been well acquainted with the limbo of early pregnancy, the constant fluttering between hope and fear. Two days later, doubled over on the toilet and clutching a hot water bottle as I watched dark clots of blood drip into the pan, it felt very much like an illness. I knew something was desperately wrong. The largest lump of tissue—what I believe to...

The times when I’ve pulled fistfuls of hair out of my head in the shower, my life wasn’t particularly stressful—or at least, it wasn’t until my hair started coming out. Then, of course, I assumed I was either balding or belatedly inheriting my family’s matrilineal thin hair. Faced with the stark reality of my hair-related vanity, I would try to comfort myself with the fact that I could at least wear fun wigs. You know, the natural cycle of things. But the explanation for this actually lies...

Robbin Sotelo Redd, Executive Director of the Tarpon Springs Housing Authority and the Local Community Housing Corporation and Vice-Chair of the Peace4Tarpon Board of Directors, likes to tell the story of the preemie hats. A retired woman in the community saw a poster in the library for Peace4Tarpon and began attending the group’s meetings. She realized that she had suffered trauma, beginning with her premature birth, and she wanted to heal that wound. So she knitted 64 preemie hats, one for...

Robert Augustin, (left to right) Katharine Bensinger and Maria Andrino of Metropolitan Family Services' Parenting Fundamentals program Katharine Bensinger founded a program called Parenting Fundamentals at an agency called Community Counseling Centers of Chicago nearly two decades ago. The program had been providing parenting education classes to low-income people for almost a decade when Bensinger attended a speech by Dr. Robert Anda , co-principle investigator of the CDC-Kaiser Permanente...