April 2017

Over the last couple years, more and more treatment centers have started saying they specialize in “Trauma Informed Therapies.” I marvel over this, as clearly indigenous to substance abuse, mental health and chronic pain is, in fact, trauma. To better understand the link between trauma and addiction, I collaborated with my colleague and friend Dr. James Flowers, CEO of Driftwood Recovery in Austin, TX. Let’s take a look at this. Larke Huang, Director of the Office of Behavioral Healthcare...

Attorney General Jeff Sessions went to the border city of Nogales, Ariz., last week to announce new instructions to federal prosecutors: bring more—a lot more—criminal cases against illegal border crossers and immigrants in the country without papers. Summoning fiery rhetoric from his years in the Senate as a warrior for tough immigration enforcement, Sessions said he was ready to take the fight to “criminal aliens and the coyotes and the document-forgers” who he warned are seeking “to...

Seat-belt use in the United States rose from 14 percent in 1985 to 84 percent in 2011 thanks, in large part, to a massive ad campaign promoting the practice. Even now, with “buckle up” warnings far less prominent, seat-belt use continues to rise . Ronald Ferguson wants to see a similar trend with the use of five evidence-based parenting principles dubbed the Boston Basics : maximize love, manage stress; talk, sing, and point; count, group, and compare; explore through movement and play; and...

Abstract CONTEXT: Exposure to traumatic events is common in primary care patients, yet health care professionals may be hesitant to assess and address the impact of childhood trauma in their patients. OBJECTIVE: To assess patient preferences for discussing traumatic experiences and posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) with clinicians in underserved, predominantly Latino primary care patients. DESIGN: Cross-sectional study. MAIN OUTCOME MEASURE: We evaluated patients with a questionnaire...

Consider the case of an African American girl, born to a single mother into abject poverty. She was raped at age 9, and pregnant at 14. Or think about a young Latina, the child of an alcoholic father and a depressed mother. This girl developed diabetes at age 8 and lost her father the following year. You might think neither girl had much hope of success. Yet the first child grew up to be entertainment mogul Oprah Winfrey; the second, Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor. [For more of this...

Viral videos are not new. Every few weeks, something will be posted in a forum such as YouTube or Facebook; a few friends will share the video with one another, and then suddenly, that video is being watched by millions. The most recent viral video takes this to a new level. April the Giraffe was not just a video, it was a live camera streaming online, allowing viewers to watch a pregnant giraffe and ultimately watch the birth of her calf. So, what makes the viral giraffe cam different than...

In a video on the Resilient KC website, police officer Mikki Cassidy notes that “my regular day is everybody else’s worst day.” Then she describes how mindfulness training has helped her find peace amid the clamor: “This moment, right here, I’m okay.” Later in the clip, Sonia Warshawski, a Holocaust survivor, recalls being shoved onto a train to Treblinka and, later, losing her mother to the gas chamber. “One of my highest points is when I speak in schools, when students tell me, ‘You...

Last week, a group of California-based foundations announced a $1.3 million investment into nonprofit community-based organizations in 11 of the state’s counties, including Los Angeles, through the Positive Youth Justice Initiative. This comes after two previous investments as part of PYJI’s three-phase initiative to eliminate racial disparities and transform the state’s juvenile justice system to better serve California’s vulnerable youth in need of trauma-informed care. This third monetary...

By James Molnar / Janice Houchins / Michael L. Howard / Mike Johnson / Members, Stark County Family Council Trauma & Resiliency Initiative Charita Goshay’s April 5 article “ Did childhood help lead a man to murder ?” evokes thoughts of Adverse Childhood Experiences, or ACEs. Many of us have at least one ACE, events we were around or witnessed in our youth. The 10 ACEs are: substance abuse, parental separation/divorce, mental illness, battered mother, criminal behavior, psychological...

“Homeless women are something of a sociological mystery,” wrote University of Virginia social scientist Ted Caplow, Ph.D . While he wasn’t talking about homeless women veterans, he might as well have been. As a phenomenon, they manage to be starkly invisible — rarely included in discussions about homeless veterans as a whole, ignored in the popular media and under-researched in the academic literature. Further adding to their marginalized status is the fact it seems almost impossible to come...

Sesame Street has unveiled a brand new website and initiative called Sesame Street in Communities . Here, you’ll find hundreds of bilingual multi-media tools to help kids and families enrich and expand their knowledge during the early years of birth through six. Our resources engage kids and adults in everyday moments and daily routines—from teaching early math and literacy concepts, to encouraging families to eat nutritious foods , to addressing serious topics such as divorce and food...

On a recent weekday, an unlikely crew of 18-to-24 year-olds gathered in a classroom in an office building, proving wrong a mantra often heard in economic development: Training programs aren’t effective at getting people good jobs. From 9 a.m. to 5 p.m., the students, mostly minorities from poor families, will tinker with computers, hone their e-mail skills,work on PowerPoint presentations, and even practice giving professional handshakes. And in a few months’ time, the 80 students will move...