“There’s an old saying in the medical community,” Dr. Jay Butler says, “statistics are people without the tears attached.” He’d know. He’s Chief Medical Officer and Director of the Division of Public Health at the Alaska Department of Health and Human Services and Chairman of the Alaska Opioid Policy Task Force. In the case of that second job description, sad stories are what drive his work. [For more of this story, written by Aurora Ford, go to ...
Today, U.S. Representatives Mike Coffman (R-CO) and Derek Kilmer (D-WA) led the bipartisan reintroduction of the Veteran Urgent Access to Mental HealthCare Act (H.R. 918). This legislation would allow the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) to provide initial mental health assessments and urgent mental healthcare services to veterans at risk of suicide or harming others, even if they have another than honorable discharge. A service member receives a less than honorable discharge, or “bad...
A novelist, essayist, playwright, and poet, James Baldwin was a writer with an arsenal of artistic talent and moral imagination. His signature style was his prose—startling in its intricate design and depth of perception, and fierce in its determination to dismantle the racial assumptions of the American republic and the English language. Baldwin lent his words and energies also to the civil-rights movement and would write one of the defining books of that era, The Fire Next Time, his 1963...
Last September, on a warm Wednesday evening, I walked through Cambridge with an Iranian-born geneticist named Pardis Sabeti. A few days before, the UN had convened a large summit “to address large movements of refugees and migrants.” Republican nominee Donald Trump was on the campaign trail, describing refugees as Trojan horses and making stark promises about curtailing immigration. His son had just tweeted an infamous image comparing Syrian refugees to a bowl of Skittles . For Sabeti, the...
The founder of the Abundant Beginnings and Forest Freedom School in Oakland, CA, shares her perspective on building resilient children in the context of systemic oppression.
Date: October 16-18, 2017 Location: Palmer House Chicago Resilience Building Tracks: Community and Public Health Military-Connected Personal Student
There is a national challenge to understand child and adult welfare. I have spent my whole life...42 years being trained to advocate and teach healthy dynamics, and for me it was life and death because my ACE score was either going to be a crutch or a gift. My training began in my mother's womb. I started my development out being fed stress chemicals, and fear chemicals, because my mother was surrounded by toxic stress, poor choice behaviors, and a family who did not support her. She is one...
Dr. Veenod L. Chulani ___________________________ The Arizona House of Representatives Committee on Health heard presentations on Feb. 9 on “Overcoming Adverse Childhood Experiences: Creating Hope for a Healthier Arizona.” During the meeting, House Health Chair Heather Carter noted that the hearing was the first step in an ongoing discussion about the importance of addressing childhood trauma. Rep. Carter H.B. 2198 , sponsor ed by Rep. Heather Carter and co-sponsor ed by Rep. Regina Cobb who...
For the first time in the United States, training is available for using the Abecedarian Approach with fidelity. Developed by Dr. Joseph Sparling (right) in the 1970s and significantly updated since then, the Abecedarian Approach has produced far-reaching and significant outcomes for children that have lasted for decades, as documented by the most famous study in early childhood care and education, FPG’s Abecedarian Project. Ongoing research has demonstrated the long-term educational,...
There are many ways that American culture tells women to be quiet—many ways they are reminded that they would really be so much more pleasing if they would just smile a little more, or talk a little less, or work a little harder to be pliant and agreeable. Women are, in general, extremely attuned to these messages; we have, after all, heard them all our lives. And so: When presiding Senate chair Steve Daines, of Montana, interrupted his colleague , Elizabeth Warren, as she was reading the...
Right now, those of us most vulnerable and least protected are under attack and whole communities―Black, Muslim, disabled, queer, trans, and women-identified folks are being targeted in the streets and in legislative halls. The threats are real and calculated. And the attempts to shore up the institutional correlation between the right to live and able-bodied, white, monied maleness is dangerous and deadly for the rest of us. We can’t overstate the impact that the outright plunder of...
Making Connections for Mental Health and Wellbeing Among Men and Boys is a national initiative to transform community conditions that influence mental wellbeing, especially for men and boys of color, veterans, and their families. Sixteen communities across the U.S. are developing and activating strategies to enhance their sociocultural, physical/built, and economic and educational environments. The Movember Foundation is funding the work; Prevention Institute is providing coordination,...
Criminologists have debated for decades whether police carry racial biases into their work—particularly the kind that leads them to kill African Americans at disproportionate rates. Much of the research in this arena suggests that yes, on balance, police officers of all races do tend to perceive African Americans as more threatening than whites. The much-revered University of California Berkeley criminology professor Paul Takagi wrote as early as 1974 that “the police have one trigger finger...
The state asks what resources, opportunities, services or supports do teens need in order to be able to behave better? Teenagers make mistakes. They sneak out past curfew to drink at a house party, shoplift clothes, graffiti their names in bathroom stalls, talk back to authorities and throw punches in heated moments. Our juvenile justice system views some of these violations as youthful folly; others are deemed criminal offenses. Unjustly, skin color or socioeconomic status might determine...
A toddler came into my examination room recently at Bayview Child Health Center in Bayview Hunters Point, an underserved, largely African-American neighborhood in San Francisco. Her mother was worried that she wasn’t growing properly, and she was right: At the age of 2½, her daughter ranked at the very bottom of the height and weight charts that pediatricians use to gauge whether kids are growing normally. My patient’s mom had tried everything she could to help her daughter eat right and...