May 2016

Last Friday, after a false start earlier in the week , Arizona restored its State Children’s Health Insurance Program, a jointly funded program that serves the working poor (those who earn too much to qualify for Medicaid). Arizona froze enrollment in the program in 2010, citing recessionary budget concerns. Arizona’s decision is a smart one, both for economic reasons — though SCHIP is state-administered, it receives substantial levels of federal funding — and because the evidence clearly...

The federal government has accused South Dakota of unconstitutionally warehousing the mentally ill and disabled in nursing homes. Meanwhile, at least 16 percent of the nation’s jail and prison inmates are estimated to be mentally ill and about 40 percent of the mentally ill have been incarcerated. Many of the homeless are also mentally ill. Deinstitutionalization, which began decades ago, was supposed to improve treatment, but was not followed by funding for better care. Do we need to return...

A father in county jail is ordered to take a parenting class, but isn’t too enthusiastic about it. As part of the class, he learns about the ACE Study, and does his own ACE score. “Oh my god!” he announces to the class. “I have 7 ACEs.” His mother’s an alcoholic. His dad’s been in and out of jail. He himself started dealing drugs at age 11, and doing drugs at 14. “I’ve got two kids at home experiencing the same things I did,” he says. The light bulb goes on. A few days after a woman who’s...

School suspension rates have risen in recent years. And since the punishment is linked to more severe problems later in life, such as dropping out of school or ending up in prison, researchers at Stanford University have been looking for ways to prevent it. Researchers asked one group of math teachers to complete a 45-minute online activity about how important it is to respect and humanize students. Meanwhile, another group of math teachers read about how to use technology in the classroom.

Twenty years ago this month, Redwood Children’s Services placed its first foster child with a foster family. Camille Schraeder, the executive director and founder of what she expected to be “just a little foster family agency,” had just received her license on April 22, after taking out a line of credit on her new house to lease office equipment. She had just left Trinity School, a facility for troubled youth under the Southern California parent company Guadalupe Homes. Trinity was based on...

A card for Mother’s Day takes time to pick out. For a person who grew up living with domestic violence, it takes even longer. There is so much they want to say, but Hallmark hasn’t quite captured the language. If I were to write one, I would probably start out with, “On this Mother’s Day, I want to tell you something that I never told you. ‘I’m so sorry that you grew up living with domestic violence.’” Because most who do, don’t even know that they experienced Childhood Domestic Violence I...

School counselor Pam Turner-Bunyon had been warned: This new, incoming student had a dark profile and was prone to very erratic behavior. "When he first came to us, he ran out of the building, the first day — the very first day — instead of coming in, he ran," she said. Turner-Bunyon learned what happened and immediately took off, dashing out into the crime-prone streets that surround the school. "I found out he was running so I went and chased him down, and coaxed him back in and we worked...

States that spend more money on social services and public health programs relative to medical care have much healthier residents than states that don’t, a study out today by a prominent public health researcher found. The study comes as the Obama administration prepares to fund its own research to support the idea that higher social service spending can improve health and lower health care costs. Last week, the Department of Health and Human Services proposed a long-awaited rule that will...

In 1986, California state assemblyman John Vasconcellos came up with what he believed could be “a vaccine for major social ills” like teen pregnancy and drug abuse: a special task-force to promote self-esteem among Californians. The effort folded three years later, and was widely considered not to have accomplished much. To Kristin Neff, a psychology professor at the University of Texas, that’s not surprising. Though self-esteem continues to reverberate as a pop-psych cure-all, the quest for...

This U.S. presidential election cycle has been filled with anger. Fist-fights in Chicago. Protesters plucked out of rallies by police officers. Hurled accusations : Mexican immigrants as “rapists,” war-tattered refugees as agents of ISIS. Much of the hostility is a function of Donald Trump, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee who has encouraged violence among his supporters and seems to exhale insults and epithets with every breath. There have been as many explanations given for...

Sure, if I were in charge at Red Mountain High School in Mesa, Arizona, I would’ve been angry at Hunter Osborn, a football player who decided, on a teammate’s dare, to expose himself. He did it during a team photo as dozens of teammates lined up in the bleachers. True, he was only 18 at the time, the knucklehead. And no, the photo isn’t all that graphic. The penis partly peeking out the top of number 42’s waistband is less noticeable than Waldo in one of his illustrated spreads. But that’s...

Has anyone heard of a state psychiatric hospital that is screening for ACEs or employing trauma-informed practices? Thanks!