July 2020

Photo caption: Sharon Mccutcheon/unsplash.com (The article below is an excerpt from my book , Crazy Was All I Ever Knew: The Impact of Maternal Mental Illness on Kid s. I have used a pseudonym to protect the privacy of family members.) Most kids of parents with a mental illness experience childhood differently and less innocently than other children as they deal with their often chaotic home lives and navigate their worlds. **** If you are the son or daughter of a parent with a mental...

By Kelsi Anderson, July 21, 2020, KSDK. "We want to support the members of our community who experience a traumatic event in the course of serving their neighbors" ST. PETERS, Mo. — Firefighters came together to create a nonprofit mental health initiative for bystanders of traumatic events after seeing the effects of post-traumatic stress disorder firsthand. Through the new Central County Fire and Rescue Community Crisis Assistance Program (CCAP), people can receive free counseling with...

By Carrie Feibel, National Public Radio, July 21, 2020 More Americans than ever — almost 72,000 — died from a drug overdose last year, according to preliminary data from the Centers for Disease Control and Protection. This grim record for 2019 was driven by deaths from synthetic opioids like fentanyl, though overdoses involving cocaine and meth also played a role. Many warn that 2020 could be even worse, as the coronavirus pandemic increases isolation, despair, and economic hardship — all...

By Melissa Gomez, Los Angeles Times, July 21, 2020 At least once a week in the mornings, Elsa Hernandez walks the mile from her apartment to the Mission Language and Vocational School, sometimes falling in line behind hundreds of other Latinos picking up groceries from the Mission Food Hub. But on a recent Thursday afternoon, she stood in a different line near the hub. Wearing a mask, her red glasses propped on her head, Hernandez, 44, a longtime resident of San Francisco’s Mission District,...

By J. David Goodman, The New York Times, July 21, 2020 The starkly divergent ways in which the coronavirus has affected neighboring communities in the Houston area — one rich and one poor — underscore how it is a magnifier of inequities. To see how the virus can largely spare one neighborhood but upend one next door, look at Bellaire, with its tidy yards and spacious homes, and Gulfton, where apartment blocks pack residents in tight. “We’re last in voter turnout, we’re last in census...

By Mallory Moench, San Francisco Chronicle, July 21, 2020 Dr. Robert Rodriguez’s anxiety rises and falls with the number of coronavirus cases and deaths. Fear that he could get infected at his San Francisco General Hospital job, or bring the virus home, affects his sleep. He doesn’t hug his 16-year-old son as much. Other worried family members avoid interacting with him. The stress isn’t sustainable, he said. “If day after day, you’re waking up and dealing with patients that are extremely...

By Eli Hager, The Marshall Project, July 21, 2020 On Sept. 12, 2018, the five adult children of Debbie Liles waited in the prosecutor’s office in Jacksonville, Florida, to meet the man who one year earlier had bludgeoned their mother to death with a golf club. Michelle, 38, had brought what she called her “madwoman” binder of colorfully highlighted police reports about the murder. Have you seen the crime-scene photos of our mom’s brain leaking onto her kitchen floor? she wanted to ask.

By BDN Community, July 9, 2020, Bangor Daily News. AUGUSTA — The Maine Hospice Council and Center for End of Life Care (MHC) has received one of 13 grants to work in partnership with the National Hospice and Palliative Care Organization’s “We Honor Veterans Program” (NHPCO/WHV) and the US Department of Veterans Affairs. The goal is to increase awareness of PTSD, moral injury and suicide and subsequent impact on end of life and palliative care. This will be accomplished in partnership with...

The right resource at the right time isn't a cure all. But it can turn an unbearable weight into a manageable challenge. Ensure the lifelines you're providing to your community are absolutely unmissable, so they provide the relief families need - when they need it the most.

Have You Completed the ACEs Aware Training? Eligible Medi-Cal providers : It’s not too late to self-attest to completing the ACEs Aware training. As a reminder, eligible Medi-Cal providers must self-attest to completing the certified ACE training to receive payment for ACE screenings conducted after July 1, 2020. Don't Forget to Self-Attest ACEs Aware has answers to your attestation questions at ACEsAware.org/FAQ . After finishing your training at Training.ACEsAware.org , you can find the...

By Dani McClain, July 21, 2020, NYT. Dee Ray doesn’t learn how children feel by listening to their words. Ray, a researcher and counselor in Texas, learns by watching them play. She directs the Center for Play Therapy at the University of North Texas and often works in schools, where she sections off a 10 feet by 10 feet area in a classroom and fills the space with toys — a child sized kitchenette, puppets, a bop bag that a child who needs to work out some aggression can punch. [ Please...

By Joseph Hayes and Heather Harris, Public Policy Institute of California, July 21, 2020 The state’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic has sent Californians back into their homes . Yet for Californians living with an abusive partner, “home” is not safe—and sheltering in place can make reporting domestic violence and getting help harder. Although incidents reported by police do not seem to have increased since shelter-in-place began, data from hotlines and service providers suggest a...