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On April 6, UC Berkeley senior Khairuldeen Makhzoomi was supposed to fly from Los Angeles to Oakland, get to campus and go to class. Instead, Makhzoomi was removed from Southwest Airlines flight 4260, detained by security officers, questioned by the FBI and refused service from Southwest after speaking Arabic before his flight took off. Makhzoomi, a 26-year-old Iraqi refugee, left Iraq in 2002 after his father, an Iraqi diplomat, was killed under Saddam Hussein’s regime. His family fled to...

When we talk about seeking health equity in this country, the goal is to ensure that all people have the access and means to live a healthy life. But the often unspoken truth underlying this challenge is that being a person of color in America – whatever your economic status – is bad for your health. Researchers have coined a term – "excess deaths" – to explain the sad fact that if blacks and whites had the same mortality rate, nearly 100,000 fewer black people would die each year in the...

One night in London in 2005, a woman said a surprisingly eerie thing to Monica Lewinsky. Lewinsky had moved from New York a few days earlier to take a master’s in social psychology at the London School of Economics. On her first weekend, she went drinking with a woman she thought might become a friend. “But she suddenly said she knew really high-powered people,” Lewinsky says, “and I shouldn’t have come to London because I wasn’t wanted there.” Lewinsky is telling me this story at a table in...

The ongoing revitalization of American downtowns has seen restaurants, businesses and residential developments result in bustling streets and thriving local economies. But often, surrounding neighborhoods haven’t experienced the same renaissance. Many families in nearby communities continue to grapple with limited housing, few services and grim commercial landscapes. We are working to change that. After two years of testing new models to identify the most promising approaches to community...

Emotions run wild during the teenage years, and there is no stopping that. For most, the highs and lows tend to balance out after a yearslong roller-coaster ride. But for a significant number of others, the suffering during those low periods can lead to full-blown depression. An estimated 11.4% of U.S. adolescents, or about 2.8 million people, had at least one “major depressive episode” in a 12-month period, according to the 2014 National Survey on Drug Use and Health. The report, prepared...

Sanctuary is a place of refuge or safety. In urban neighborhoods all throughout America, sanctuary is a luxury almost beyond attainment. But Michael O'Bryan is working to bring that sense of sanctuary to the North Philadelphia community of Strawberry Mansion. The Sanctuary Model originated in Philadelphia in the early 1980s. It promotes safety and recovery from adversity through the active creation of a trauma-informed community. Crucial to this program is the understanding that trauma is a...

Michael Salzman (2005) in his article entitled, “Contextualizing the Symptom in Multicultural Consultation; Anger in a Cultural- Historical Context” discusses how anger has become a major focus of counseling services in school settings. Based at the University of Hawaii, Salzman shares through his research on Native Hawaiians how colonization, disempowerment, cultural oppression and the process of political and psychological decolonization have helped generate an atmosphere that seeds the...

****Hanna Teklu speaks at August, 2015 School to Prison Pipeline event**** This NPR story describes how Together We Bake has helped women who have been imprisoned gain invaluable work experience and regain lost independence. I met one of those women, Hanna Teklu, when she told her story at a forum on dismantling the school to prison pipeline last August at the University of the District of Columbia David E. Clark School of Law, sponsored by the DC Trauma-Informed Initiative and ACEs...

Students in Claire Foote's music class at Jesse S. Bobo Elementary School smiled brightly as they worked together using tissue boxes to choreograph a song about sneezing. Down the hall, teacher Jessica Barwick led groups of fifth-grade students in a classroom Lego building project. At Jesse S. Bobo Elementary, teachers and students are encouraged to model positive behaviors as a way to reinforce kindness and respect toward others. “We're being proactive and we're talking to students about...

Jordin Purcell-Riess has worked as a registered nurse at the emergency department at St. Francis Hospital in Hartford, Conn., for three years. She describes her workplace as phones going off, voices everywhere, every room full. "You look around and the hallways are full of patients on stretchers; you walk out to the waiting room and you can see on our board that there's 15 people signing in," she says. "The second you can get your ICU patient upstairs, there's another one waiting for you."...

An obese woman comes into a doctor’s office, and the doctor thinks he is helping her address her problem by putting her on a diet. She loses 150 pounds, but then quickly regains the weight. Confused by this outcome, the doctor delves deeper and learns this patient was molested as a child. She ate food to feel better, then discovered that obesity reduced sexual notice, providing her with a sense of protection. Sometimes, what presents as the problem may in fact be somebody’s attempt at a...

[Photo by Alberto Abouganem Stephens ] April is “Alcohol Awareness Month.” On the surface this appears to be about alcohol, its use and abuse, it implies that we need to learn more about why a person might drink alcoholically or, by extension use other substances to their detriment. But there is a much larger story here. It’s the story of all of those mothers, fathers, sisters, brothers, aunts, uncles and cousins who care about and are concerned about this person who is abusing alcohol. And...