June 2017

Spending a Saturday morning in a classroom is not something most kids want to do. So why did 110 kids between 9 and 17 years old in Lawrenceville, Georgia, do that in mid-May? They received basketball instruction from retired NBA stars and learned how to deal with police, tense situations and about Georgia law via Juvenile Justice Jeopardy . [For more of this story, written by Ali Sardar, go to http://jjie.org/2017/06/12/kids-compete-learn-in-juvenile-justice-jeopardy-game/]

America may feel like a nation split in two, and in some ways, it is. Just days after the election, a Gallup poll found that a record high 77 percent of the country believed that the country is divided on the most important values. Recent incidents like a Republican congressional candidate allegedly assaulting a journalist and tension at town hall meetings suggest more heated moments are still to come. Yet it’s possible to debate the issues without getting ugly. [For more of this story,...

With 18 years of teaching under his belt, Ray Salazar thought he had mastered classroom management. But a boisterous high-school junior named Salina Richter quickly jolted Salazar out of his complacency. When Richter ignored his commands to stop talking during the first meeting of his AP English class, the teacher—uncharacteristically—erupted. Immediately, Salazar knew he had made a mistake; he could feel his control over the classroom slipping away. And for the moment, Richter knew that she...

Activists and policymakers often rattle off figures to get Americans to care about their country's mass-incarceration problem : More than two million people are locked up in prisons and jails in the United States. In state prisons, African-American men are imprisoned at a rate around five times higher than that of white men. The U.S. accounts for a little over 4 percent of the world's population, yet holds 21 percent of the world's prison population. But PBS's new documentary The Prison in...

“Emotions are not just the fuel that powers the psychological mechanism of a reasoning creature, they are parts, highly complex and messy parts, of this creature’s reasoning itself,” philosopher Martha Nussbaum wrote in her incisive treatise on the intelligence of emotions , titled after Proust’s powerful poetic image depicting the emotions as “geologic upheavals of thought.” But much of the messiness of our emotions comes from the inverse: Our thoughts, in a sense, are geologic upheavals of...

Helen Riess, MD is Director of the Empathy and Relational Science Program in the Department of Psychiatry at Massachusetts General Hospital and Associate Professor of Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School. Her research team at Massachusetts General Hospital conducts translational research utilizing the neuroscience of emotions to enhance patient-clinician communication and personal skills. She is also the co-founder of Empathetics, Inc. , which provides innovative empathy and interpersonal...

Matthew Morgenstern is convinced his Hodgkin's lymphoma was caused by exposure to toxic coal ash from the massive dump right across the road from SCI Fayette, a maximum-security prison in LaBelle, Pennsylvania, where he is currently serving a 5- to 10-year sentence. "In 2010 and until I left in 2013, the water always had a brown tint to it. Not to mention the dust clouds that used to come off the dump trucks ... which we all breathed in.... Every single day I would wake up and there would be...

For millions of Americans, housing costs are perversely mismatched to hourly wages. In 2017, the average U.S. worker would need to bring in a whopping $21.21 per hour to reasonably afford a modest two-bedroom apartment. That’s nearly three times the federal minimum wage of $7.25, and roughly 30 percent more than the $16.38 hourly wage that the average U.S. renter brings home. These stark numbers come from the National Low Income Housing Coalition’s latest Out of Reach report , which maps the...

Treating Trauma Without Drama -- online Summit -- 25 speakers, representing 5 different models of therapy -- and TOTALLY FREE. Suitable for Beginning Therapists | Experienced Therapists | Trauma Survivors

There's nothing wrong with trying something new -- you've got no restrictions in private practice -- but don't forget that public health service managers are responsible for spending other people's money, amidst a sea of potentially competing priorities. But, someone's got the message, if you're going to innovate, evaluate the success of what you do. See the story here. It's really encouraging to see this coming about in the ever-so-budget conscious UK National Health Service

This is no doubt an "advert" for an upcoming "course" on Sounds True -- one of the 'pop psych" trio -- but this webinar could be worth a look. It's an important topic for those recovering from ACEs. Usually these things are 1/4 to 1/3 advert mixed in with some worthwhile information.

I love yoga and writing. I need yoga and writing. Both are relatively affordable and can be done alone and at home or in community. Both have been central to my survival, recovery and growth which I write about below. I also love sharing and supporting survivor-led resources created for survivors and others. Here are two links to those if you want to get to those right away. There are more details about each following the essay: Write Your Story, Heal Your Life Summit: Alaura O'Dell...