May 2017

Traumatic experiences happen-but when they happen to children, it can affect their view of the world, their sense of safety, their development, and even their longer-term physical and mental health. According to the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA), more than two-thirds of children reported at least one traumatic experience by age 16. While not every child will be traumatized from a difficult experience, some potentially traumatic events could include abuse,...

About 18 months ago, there seemed to be a growing national consensus about the imperative of criminal-justice reform. There was rare bipartisan agreement on the scale and scope of the challenges America’s incarceration crisis presents. While it seems that federal momentum for reform has slowed—if not reversed, as of late—it’s still possible to take meaningful steps toward justice locally. [For more of this story, written by Darren Walker, go to ...

On a cloudy day in February, Will Cox pointed to a pair of news photos that prompted a room of University of Wisconsin, Madison, graduate students to shift in their seats. In one image, a young African American man clutches a carton of soda under his arm. Dark water swirls around his torso; his yellow shirt is soaked. In the other, a white couple is in water up to their elbows. The woman is tattooed and frowning, gripping a bag of bread. Cox read aloud the captions that were published...

This is 19-year-old Emily Palmer from Wiltshire, southwest England, who is currently doing an apprenticeship in business administration. She's the author of a book on mental health for small children called Scrambled Heads. "I decided to write the book after my own experiences with mental health," Palmer told BuzzFeed News. "Having battled with anxiety and anorexia nervosa, I wanted to use my own experiences to encourage conversations on such an important topic." [For more of this story,...

When Allison Sampson-Jackson talks to kids who have experienced abuse or witnessed violence she is all energy and encouragement and in-your-face praise, like she was at the LaSalle School Thursday, as she helps them understand what trauma does to their brains. If she works with them a while, they learn to recognize stress responses in each other: "His amygdala's on fire!" they'll say when someone explodes or gets aggressive, referring to the brain's flight-or-fight center. And then: "Send...

Science shows children's exposure to trauma and toxic stress could lead to major health problems later in life. Walk into any classroom at Evansville's Ark Crisis Child Care Center, and you will find children who feel safe and welcome. "A lot of the kids that we see have lived in a number of different places, they don't have a home, they don't have some place to call their own," said Angie Richards Cooley, Ark Crisis Child Care Center executive director. "So we work really hard here at Ark...

NTHP - The Next Step In The Evolution of Our Healing. Trauma is the most misdiagnosed, mis treated and ignored dis-ease in the world today. What we currently define as trauma is at the foundation of most mental health disorders. Fortunately, there is now a way to deal with this epidemic. The Neuro Trauma Healing Process can bring not only relief to those who need it, but will turn the tables on and change the way we view and deal with mental health altogether. I am talking about the trauma...

Where are you on your healing journey? Are you just getting started? Are you about to take the next step? Are you stuck? Or are you in the messy middle, overwhelmed with grief, feeling like the tears and sadness will never end? If you feel stuck, that’s probably because you have no idea what to do next. That’s how I felt years ago when I realized I didn’t know how to receive my husband’s love. How could I not know something like that? It seemed so simple for everyone else. What was wrong...

Join me - Dr. Lee-Anne Gray - to learn some of the ways I help teens cultivate self-compassion! Based on Self-Compassion for Teens: 129 Activities and Practices to Cultivate Kindness - and sponsored by PESI: May 17, 2017 in St. Cloud, MN May 18, 2017 in Roseville, MN May 19, 2017 in Bloomington, MN Earn CEU's while accessing your own inner source of kindness so you can help others too! Topics covered: self-compassion, compassion, and empathy adhd anxiety depression anger procrastination...

Ever struggle to get the conversation going with teens? Wondering how to introduce mindful awareness and self-compassion to adolescents? Self-Compassion and Mindful Awareness for Teens - is a card deck based on Self-Compassion for Teens: 129 Activities & Practices to Cultivate Kindness. It's a handy-dandy set of quick reminders of some of the activities in the book. Topics covered include: Self-compassion compassion ADHD LGBT+ Body Image Anxiety Depression Check it out and let me know...

A few years ago, I was prompted to write a short e-book, The Happy Family , on the strategies we use in our home to promote more happiness. It all began with a formal family gratitude practice in January 2013, and morphed into 10 different strategies that create more harmony and respect in families. With mindful awareness practices infusing our home life, 10 strategies seemed to emerge simultaneously from the literature I was surveying in neuroscience, positive psychology, Buddhist...

Women are more likely to be anxious when they live in a poor community than in a more affluent one, a new British study suggests. But researchers say the same isn't true for men. "We see from our study that women who live in deprived areas not only have to cope with the effects of living in poverty, but are also much more susceptible to anxiety than their peers," said study lead author Olivia Remes. She's a candidate at the University of Cambridge Department of Public Health and Primary...