April 2017

When you go to a doctor’s office, do they ask you how you feel emotionally? Research suggests that they should, because physical health and mental health are connected. In a ten-year study, Intermountain Healthcare found important correlations in helping people heal better by using team-based practices with patients, including having mental health experts in the doctor’s office. The study was published in Journal of the American Medical Association and recently won the national Hearst Health...

Here is an excerpt from a GREAT article by Jay Watts : Psychological and social factors are at least as significant and, for many, the main cause of suffering. Poverty , relative inequality , being subject to racism, sexism, displacement and a competitive culture all increase the likelihood of mental suffering – as the survivor-led collective Recovery in the Bin brilliantly illuminates. Add into the mix individual experiences such as childhood sexual abuse , early separation , emotional...

Elisabeth Corey writes so honestly on her Beating Trauma blog . I'm a huge fan of her writing and advocacy work. This piece, in particular, is amazing. She writes about adult relationships and how they have been impacted deeply and consistently by ACEs in childhood. We know what we have lived. Unlearning and learning new and different things takes time and work. And it helps, that parents like Elisabeth share as they learn. We all benefit from that sharing. Many of us are learning how to...

Pam Bunyon faced the 4th graders, some splayed in chairs but most arrayed on the rug before her. On the whiteboard, she showed them the outline of a human head. Next to it were some big words for the 9- and 10-year-olds: Cortex. Amygdala. Brain stem. Bunyon, the counselor at Powel Elementary School, was using science to help students understand their impulses and give them strategies to deal with them. “So we don’t flip out,” as she and the class put it. [For more of this story, written by...

The idea that locking up parents can have baleful effects on their children’s health isn’t exactly new. I have written before about research that found links between the incarceration of parents and learning disabilities, developmental delays and behavior problems, even after other variables were taken into account. But a new paper published Thursday in the British journal The Lancet makes clear just how unequal the effects of incarceration can be on families in the United States, which...

State lawmakers are considering a measure to declare youth violence as a public health epidemic. The House Resolution sponsored by Democrat Bruce Franks Jr. of St. Louis calls for the establishment of statewide trauma-informed education. Franks contends PTSD – Post Traumatic Stress Disorder – is a condition that afflicts kids who’ve experienced violence. “The fact that I am 33 and I have been to now 155 funerals, an average of seven funerals since the age of six is not normal” said Franks.

Even for an administration that has made anti-immigrant rhetoric routine, the speech that Attorney General Jeff Sessions gave on Tuesday was shocking in both tone and content. Sessions was ostensibly announcing a set of tough new measures targeting gangs, which he described as “criminal organizations that turn cities and suburbs into warzones, that rape and kill innocent citizens and who profit by smuggling poison and other human beings across our borders.” But in practice, these measures...

In the spring and summer of 2011, researchers from the University of Pennsylvania strapped heart monitors onto test subjects and set them loose on the side streets of Philadelphia. The subjects strolled around two clusters of vacant lots. Some of the lots had received a “greening” treatment from members of the Philadelphia Horticulture Society, who’d removed debris, planted grass and trees, and installed a low wooden post-and-rail fence. The other lots were untreated as a control. After...

The New York Times recently ran a peculiarly pathetic article about yet another victim of the Trump administration that you probably never thought to worry about: the children’s publishing industry . The problem, as the article’s author, Katherine Rosman, repeatedly implies but cannot come out and say, is that Donald Trump is pretty much a walking advertisement for everything we don’t want our children to be. And yet he’s the president. Children are supposed to respect the president. What to...

W hen scientists began tracking the health of 268 Harvard sophomores in 1938 during the Great Depression, they hoped the longitudinal study would reveal clues to leading healthy and happy lives. They got more than they wanted. After following the surviving Crimson men for nearly 80 years as part of the Harvard Study of Adult Development , one of the world’s longest studies of adult life, researchers have collected a cornucopia of data on their physical and mental health. [For more of this...

With national policy likely to compound the income and wealth gap in the coming years, states and localities are fighting back. Across the country, local jurisdictions aren’t waiting for federal action or corporate governance reforms to close the wage gap. In December, for example, the city of Portland, Oregon, passed an ordinance to raise the business tax on companies with CEOs who earn more than 100 times the median pay of their workers. Portland officials said the ordinance is the first...

It’s a warm spring afternoon and Arturo Soriano is in his old stomping grounds—at Teralta Park, a small urban park atop a sunken freeway in San Diego’s City Heights neighborhood. As a teenage gang member in the 1980s, Soriano roamed the park and the surrounding streets before spending the better part of two decades in prison. Now 40, he has returned with a different mission.