May 2020

After I endured a life-changing personal tragedy -- losing my six-year-old son in the Sandy Hook School tragedy -- I founded the nonprofit Jesse Lewis Choose Love Movement to address mental health issues and help others find strength and positivity in life. Through Choose Love, I provide a solution that will take children from whatever level of personal development they are in and provide them with the skills, tools, and awareness they need to advance so they can connect with each other;...

By John Kelly, The Chronicle of Social Change, May 5, 2020. In 2019 , Nebraska announced plans for a pilot project in which foster parents would play a starring role in the reunification process, going beyond the traditional role of a caregiver for kids. These specialized resource families, through a strategy known as shared or co-parenting, support and mentor birth parents in hopes that children can more quickly and safely be returned home. Just before the coronavirus hit, New York City’s...

By B. Garrett and A. Gangopadhyaya, RWJF, May 4, 2020 . The Issue An estimated 160 million people nationwide under the age of 65 had health insurance through their employer just before the COVID-19 pandemic hit. Thirty million workers filed for unemployment between March 15 and April 25, according to federal statistics. Rising unemployment is expected to significantly alter the health insurance coverage landscape, as millions who lose their jobs and their dependents enroll in Medicaid,...

By Jane Brody, The NY Times, May 11, 2020. Even if no other good for health care emerges from the coronavirus crisis, one development — the incorporation of telemedicine into routine medical care — promises to be transformative. Using technology that already exists and devices that most people have in their homes, medical practice over the internet can result in faster diagnoses and treatments, increase the efficiency of care and reduce patient stress. Without having to travel to a doctor’s...

Documentary filmmaker Michelle Esrick pinpoints the moment that convinced her that telling the story of severe childhood trauma and the path toward healing of her long-time friend and Saturday Night Live luminary Darrell Hammond could likely make a difference in the lives of many. “Cracked Up: The Darrell Hammond Story” details Hammond’s years-long attempt to deal with his traumatic childhood, during which he had suffered severe physical and emotional abuse. “Behind the scenes, Darrell...

I don’t know why you’re not allowed to say this, but I will: Talking about the trauma that happened to you as a kid will not, by itself, heal Childhood PTSD. In fact, for a lot of us, talking about it, exploring it and processing it (the approach in traditional therapy) can make healing from trauma even harder. Do you relate to this at all? As someone who spent the first thirty-plus years of my life struggling with the effects of a hard childhood, I want to impress on you that the solution...

Mindfulness, meditation, or prayer when practiced one half an hour every day over eight weeks, has shown a difference in several brain regions that control learning, emotions, memory, and the fear response. These regions include the amygdala and the hippocampus, regions that control the fight/flight/freeze/fawn response.

The Office of Advocacy and Reform (OAR), established by Governor Tom Wolf’s 2019 executive order to protect Pennsylvania’s vulnerable populations, today announced the launch of a volunteer think tank comprised of 25 experts representing a diversity of fields and backgrounds who will develop a plan to make Pennsylvania a trauma-informed state. “The people of Pennsylvania are compassionate, thoughtful and resilient. We take care of each other, and that drive to protect our families and our...

In an unprecedented global shutdown, many of us, especially without the noise and distraction of everyday life, are facing intensified, often destabilizing feelings. And that includes kids—whether they’re able to say so or not.

By Neeraj Bhala, Gwnetta Curry, et al., The Lancet, May 8, 2020 Tackling injustices, including those that result from prejudice and racism globally, is essential in the response to the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic. Here, we focus on UK South Asian and Black and African-American populations, using internationally recognised terminology and definitions, and consider the UK and the USA as globally relevant examples. We recognise other minorities also need consideration in the...

By Albert Wong, Psychology Today, May 7, 2020 Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) has been a de facto standard of care within psychotherapy for the last 30 years. Certainly, CBT has shifted and changed over the years—particularly with the mindfulness revolution of the past decade—but the underlying ethos of CBT which places cognition and behavior in positions of elevated primacy in the psychotherapeutic healing process has remained relatively intact—at least within the halls of academe. There...

By Gail Saltz, U.S. News & World Report, May 8, 2020 IT’S AN EXCEPTIONALLY difficult time right now for everyone. The stress and anxiety of illness, social distancing , being cooped up in quarantine , trying to work from home with children trying to distance learn from home, serious economic concerns and no known end in sight with tremendous uncertainty about the future is a collective trauma of sorts for us all. As a result, we expect that some of us are going to struggle with mental...