August 2018

Last month, President Donald Trump 's Council of Economic Advisors issued a 64-page report calling for both new and stronger work requirements for participants in non-cash welfare programs such as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program and Medicaid . In the weeks since the report was issued, the Trump administration approved Medicaid work requirements in several states, and congressional allies in the House of Representatives passed a 2018 farm bill that would subject more SNAP...

Six middle- and high-school students sat around a table on a Monday afternoon, watching a psychologist write three letters on a whiteboard: O-C-D. “What does O.C.D. stand for?” the psychologist, Avital Falk, asked the group. [For more on this story by Andrea Petersen, go to https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/13/health/ocd-concentrated-therapy-cbt.html ]

Young children who are regularly engaged in conversation by adults may have stronger connections between two developing brain regions critical for language, according to a study of healthy young children that confirms a hypothesis registered with the Open Science Framework. This finding, published in JNeurosci, was independent of parental income and education, suggesting that talking with children from an early age could promote their language skills regardless of their socioeconomic status.

Americans who grew up with the fiction that slavery was confined to the South — and that the North had always been “free” — learned differently in 1991, when construction workers stumbled upon the skeletal remains of more than 400 Africans at a site in New York City that has since been designated the African Burial Ground National Monument . The catalog of injuries etched into the bones of the men and women who labored to build, feed and protect Colonial-era New York includes muscles so...

For some students, school is not just a place of learning and growth but also a refuge from abuse. Data suggest that, on average, every classroom has at least one student affected by trauma. According to the National Child Traumatic Stress Network, close to 40 percent of students in the U.S. have been exposed to some form of traumatic stressor in their lives, with sexual assault, physical assault, and witnessing domestic violence being the three most prevalent. These types of stressors,...

When 15-year-old Luis Cruz joined the Latin Kings in 1991, he was a child by almost any measure: he couldn’t legally drive, drop out of school, or buy a beer. But was he still a child a few years later when — just months after he turned 18 — he murdered two people on the orders of gang leaders? Earlier this year, a federal judge in Connecticut said yes . The judge decided that a 2012 Supreme Court ruling that forbade mandatory sentences of life without parole for juveniles should apply to...

Johann Hari’s experience with depression is something of a lightning rod within mental health circles. Some cheer his nuanced views of the disorder, grateful for a take on mental health that emphasizes the impacts of environment and experience. Others argue that the British journalist is too dismissive of medication. “Is everything Johann Hari knows about depression wrong?” reads a headline that ran in a U.K. newspaper. The extreme reactions to the best-selling author of Lost Connections:...

No one should have to endure sexual harassment, or tolerate its prevalence. No one should have to live in a world that is deaf and blind to how pervasive it is. The #MeToo social media movement breaks the silence. The hashtag is a rallying cry for anyone harassed or assaulted to help demonstrate how enormous the problem is. Yet the viral reach of #MeToo is problematic for some survivors. If #MeToo has made you feel troubled, sad, upset or angry, you’re not alone. And today I’d like to talk...

Second Platoon did not hide its dark mood as its soldiers waded across the Korengal River in the bright light of afternoon. It was early in April 2009 and early in the Pentagon’s resumption in earnest of the Afghan war. The platoon’s mission was to ascend a mountain slope and try to ambush the Taliban at night. They were about 30 men in all, riflemen and machine-gunners reinforced with scouts, a mix of original platoon members and replacements who filled gaps left by the wounded and the...

Employer expectations of work email monitoring during nonwork hours are detrimental to the health and well-being of not only employees but their family members as well. William Becker, a Virginia Tech associate professor of management in the Pamplin College of Business, co-authored a new study, "Killing me softly: electronic communications monitoring and employee and significant-other well-being," showing that such expectations result in anxiety, which adversely affects the health of...

An estimated 12.8 percent of adolescents in the U.S. experience at least one episode of major depression, according to the National Institute of Mental Health. According to previous studies , many of those teens' mental health is linked to depression in their parents. But new research suggests there's a flipside to that parental effect: When teens are treated for depression, their parents' mental health improves, too. We tend to think of depression as affecting individuals. But Myrna...

Being a new mom is incredibly tough— particularly in the US, where women may lack access to paid leave, parenting support programs, and affordable childcare and health-care services. But research suggests that we need to start offering a lot more support and care to men making the transition to parenthood, too. The past decade or so has seen increasing awareness of how important fathers are to their children’s development. With that understanding has come a renewed focus on new dads’ mental...