August 2017

A New Hampshire organization believes that early intervention is the key to dealing with the state's opioid crisis. More than 140 people have died this year from drug overdoses in New Hampshire. Officials said children are on the front line of the crisis. "More children are experiencing stress in the home," Manchester Police Chief Nick Willard said. "They are seeing trauma every day. I have seen it personally, being out on the street with the officers." Willard said that last year, New...

No matter what the premise of anything called Ten Little Indians, it is all based on death, murder or genocide, and in the end the Indians are all going to die. Right? And it’s just a game, isn’t it? Something that children play, so why change it or argue over it? It’s so innocent. Right? As originally outlined in an opinion piece by Julianne Jennings , the rhyme was written by noted American songwriter Septimus Winner in 1864 (or 1868) and performed at minstrel shows. It was then adapted in...

The number of young people suffering from depression has increased almost 40 percent in the last three years. And, as the Hamilton Southeastern School District has found, mental health issues are hardly limited to teens. After the city of Fishers, an Indianapolis suburb of about 90,000, had 13 suicides in 2016, city officials launched a campaign to destigmatize mental health issues—including in the school system. Last year, Hamilton schools passed a referendum to provide mental health...

When Paula Gosal took over as principal of the Chilliwack Middle School, she walked smack into the middle of a long-standing debate among the staff over awards. It wasn’t exactly a rumble that Gosal was tossed into so abruptly in the fall of 2016. Most of the teachers at this school for seventh- through ninth-graders in British Columbia had read the literature on awards, and were looking for feedback and support from their new principal. The majority wanted to do away with the school’s...

Have you talked with friends, siblings or co-workers about Parenting with ACEs while going through the change? Do you have any fascinating facts to share about how your OBGYN prepared or supported you when thrown by midlife, hormonal shifts and emotional residue from traumatic stress? Me either. And it's a shame. A lot of people parent, go through menopause, and have survived a bunch of ACEs. Conversations and information shouldn't be so hard to find. But they are. T hat's the reason we...

Earlier this week, Robin Young of the NPR/WBUR Boston radio program “Here & Now” interviewed Wanda Saunders, widow of the late sportscaster John Saunders. John Saunders’s memoir, “Playing Hurt”, was published posthumously on August 8, 2017. Saunders died in 2016. The book is about Saunders’s struggle with severe depression, in part a result of abuse by his father. The link below includes audio of the interview, the text of interview highlights, and an excerpt from “Playing Hurt”. I...

Social workers and other healthcare providers are invited and encouraged to join a webinar entitled: "Human Trafficking In Adolescents: Understanding the Issues as a Service Provider" Child sex trafficking, also known as commercial sexual exploitation or sex trafficking of minors, remains a complex and unaddressed form of violence against children and adolescents. It’s estimated there are approximately 100,000 victims and 300,000 youth at risk in the United States. Recognizing warning signs...

On August 8, President Trump spoke to the opioid crisis in this country and declined to declare a national emergency as recommended by the “President’s Commission on Combating Drug Addiction and the Opioid Crisis.” Instead, the President emphasized the law and order aspects of the problem and the importance of preventing drug use in the first place since addiction is so hard to overcome. The Commission will make a final report in the fall. The recently released interim report makes eight...

The story of Wilkinsburg, Pennsylvania, is the story of how a small black city fights from vanishing, or rather, from being vanished away, and the black women who were recently installed to lead that fight. In May, Marita Garrett was elected the first black woman to serve as mayor for the Borough of Wilkinsburg , which sits on the eastern border of Pittsburgh in the Big Tech-centric city’s shadows. The Wilkinsburg she is inheriting is one that, like a lot of small municipalities, is fighting...

The Concrn app debuted in San Francisco. Experts see some benefits to the new product but say more needs to be done to make it effective. Seeing a homeless person can be a common occurrence when walking down a city street, but knowing the best way to help someone isn’t always easy. Many passersby concerned about someone might dial 911, but a new app is offering an alternative. Concrn allows users to report a homeless person who needs assistance. In these cases, a trained community member...

In a new study of video games, researchers found that the hippocampal system of the brain is influenced by the navigation strategy that a person employs as well as the genre of the game. The hippocampus is the brain region associated with spatial learning, navigation, and memory and is critical to healthy cognition. The more depleted the hippocampus becomes, the more a person is at risk of developing brain illnesses and diseases ranging from depression to schizophrenia , PTSD and Alzheimer’s...

After 9/11, I was asked by the Baltimore City Health Commissioner to help prepare the city for a radiation terrorism event, because my entire career up until that point had been in radiation-based medical imaging. I didn’t know anything about public health preparedness at the time, but I found it very fulfilling to work with the city health department and other first responders, especially fire and police. Public health preparedness science and research is more than multi-disciplinary, it’s...