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Mental health is one of the last remaining taboos in the workplace. Yet one in six workers in the U.K. experience depression, anxiety or stress which is a significant portion of the workforce. It also appears as if attitudes towards mental health in the workplace remain in the dark ages: 56% of employers say they wouldn’t hire someone with depression, according to a mental health report published this year. H.R. plays a critical role in tackling the stigma surrounding mental health as well...

The Midwest ACE Summit will take place in Minnesota on November 10th and 11th. We hope that you will join us for this opportunity to connect and learn with others across the state and region! We are currently inviting presentation proposals from folks across the Midwest who would like to facilitate workshop (breakout) sessions. The deadline for submissions is August 1st . For more information, please see the attached RFP form. Please share this form across your networks! For more information...

Is it possible for Candace Vance to find a good job? Vance, 31, is a single mother of two who hasn’t worked for more than a year. She’s on Wisconsin’s version of welfare, called Wisconsin Works, or W-2, which provides her with $650 a month. In order to receive that money, Vance is required to look for a job, and if she doesn’t find one, she’ll eventually lose her benefits. The challenge, for Vance and for millions of people like her, is that the jobs available to her don’t provide much of a...

The people paid to watch America's children tend to live in poverty. Nearly half receive some kind of government assistance: food stamps, welfare checks, Medicaid. Their median hourly wage is $9.77 — about $3 below the average janitor's. In a new report , researchers at UC Berkeley say that child care is too vital to the country's future to offer such meager wages. Those tasked with supporting kids, they say, are shaping much of tomorrow's workforce. "Economic insecurity, linked to low...

When Annie Powell, 35, was in the midst of a 72-hour manic episode in February 2013, she felt like Superwoman: productive and energetic. “I went to the gym for a 5:30 a.m. class, worked all day, came home and went to the gym again with my family. Then, I stayed up all night and organized my office, worked more, cleaned the house and did laundry,” says Annie. But once the 72 hours ended, she crashed and fell into a deep depression. “I sat in the basement and stared at the wall for hours,”...

In 1871, while performing an autopsy on a notorious bank robber, the Italian criminologist Cesare Lombroso saw something unusual. It was a small hollow at the base of the skull, under which lay an enlarged section of the spinal cord. The feature was rare in Europeans, but he had seen it in lower apes and certain ‘inferior races’ of South America. Eureka. ‘At the sight of that skull,’ he later wrote, he understood the biological nature of the criminal – ‘an atavistic being who reproduces in...

Legislators July 6 passed the Helping Families in Mental Health Crisis Act (H.R. 2646) by an overwhelming 422-2. The bill - originally introduced three years ago by Reps. Tim Murphy (R-Pa.) and Eddie Bernice Johnson (D-Texas) in the aftermath of the 2012 Newtown tragedy reflected the frustration of many who know we can and should do better when it comes to people with serious mental illnesses. Families left without support to care for loved ones, law enforcement officers who too often are...

At the Golden Globe Awards, in January, Ennio Morricone won Best Original Score for his contribution to “The Hateful Eight,” the Quentin Tarantino Western. Accepting the award on Morricone’s behalf was Tarantino himself, who brandished the trophy in a gesture of vindication, suggesting that Morricone, despite all the honors he has received, is nevertheless underrated. Tarantino proclaimed Morricone his favorite composer. “And when I say favorite composer,” he added, “I don’t mean movie...

On the first day of kindergarten every year, public school teachers and administrators stand at their school portals with arms opened wide to embrace every child. Teachers comfort every student readying their cerebral blank slate to be filled with the three R’s — reading, writing and arithmetic. There is only one problem. Kids don’t come to kindergarten with a tabula rasa mind, a blank slate of perceptions, ideas, thoughts and emotions. This may be true for the three R’s, but the experiences...

Photo by Chris Campbell ___________________________________________________________________ To continue our build-out of the ACEs Connection Resources Center, this week we're focusing on resilience surveys. Resilience surveys and scales measure different aspects of our ability to adapt or deal with life events. Many focus on five characteristics of resilience -- purpose, perseverance, self reliance, equanimity, and authenticity. Some look at the resilience factors we had as children, others...

Cappy's Boxing Gym, Seattle WA, is a community hub devoted to health through boxing, self awareness and expression. Not only do people come to this gym for stress release, to get in shape and learn how to box, but also to learn more about how the punch path heals past trauma. Simplistically, if you deliver a punch at a target, you will punch according to who shows up to throw it. A bully throws a different punch than does the bullied or the bystander, who throws nothing. It takes three to...

When I was a boy, my mother would give me and two of my sisters a quarter to go to the movies at the Northern Lights Theater in Cordova, AK. We were a divorced family at the time and I had a stepdad in the home. I was unaware of the trauma we had gone through, alcoholism and domestic violence, that led to my dad’s absence. The trauma was building up in the three of us, and Saturday movies were a treat we could look forward to. A quarter bought us admission, popcorn and a soda. For a couple...