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As an ACE activist, I talk to a lot of people about the impact of ACE’s in society. For many conversations, the results are predictable. When I talk or write about the negative impact of aggressive spanking, I am told “I was spanked and I turned out OK.” I am also reminded of the old Testament passage of “spare the rod, spoil the child.” I have abandoned both excuses a long time ago. But I get this as a common defense to spanking. I also hear an admonition...

Not many people ever make it out of the ADX. Officially called the United States Penitentiary Administrative Maximum Facility in Florence — and colloquially known as the “Alcatraz of the Rockies” — the ADX is the highest-security federal prison in the country, located in the Colorado mountains. It houses some of the more notorious inmates in recent American history, from Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev to September 11 conspirator Zacarias Moussaoui to...

Could roof-straddling “sky walks” soon be coming to Stockholm? A new plan proposed for the Swedish capital would see a large slice of its city center built over with densely packed towers, joined at their peaks by a dramatic zigzag of tree-lined, open air gangways. Commissioned by Sweden’s opposition Center Party, the plan might seem a little fanciful. But it nonetheless answers some key questions that Stockholm is currently being forced to ask itself. Sweden’s...

Last year, Trae Vassallo took the stand during Ellen Pao’s discrimination case against Kleiner Perkins, testifying vividly about her experience being sexually harassed by a former partner at the VC firm. Afterwards, she says an “overwhelming number” of women approached her to share their own stories of harassment. Despite having been on the receiving end of unwanted sexual advances, Vassallo was surprised at how prevalent the issue seemed to be—and says that most men...

It was the fake $100 bill that finally landed Corey Roberts in prison. He’d already had one close call, getting picked up for marijuana possession at the end of his freshman year in college. By the middle of his sophomore year, he and some friends were selling pot too. Then one of their buddies passed a rival dealer the bogus Benjamin. That led to a beatdown that drew the attention of campus police and an 18-month stretch behind bars, including nine months in a prison drug treatment...

More than 15 million American adults seek treatment for depression each year. However, a first-of-its-kind study by researchers at The Dartmouth Institute for Health Policy & Clinical Practice reveals an eye-opening disconnect between the priorities of patients and clinicians when it comes to the information needed to make decisions about treatment options. The good news is that both patients and clinicians who treat depression consider whether a treatment will work to be the most...

Discrimination has been linked with negative health outcomes among racial minorities, including increased rates of mental health problems such as panic attacks 1 , generalized anxiety disorder 2 , depression 3 and suicidal ideation 4 . “Racial discrimination is a type of chronic stress that leads to both psychological and physiological stress responses and, as such, contributes to the disease process that results in negative physical and mental health outcomes for those who experience...

One Sunday night in March, 1985, Michele Murray, a sophomore at Texas Tech University, tried to find a parking space near her dorm. In the preceding months, four women had been raped on or near the Texas Tech campus, in the small plains city of Lubbock; local newspapers speculated about a “Tech rapist,” but the police had no solid leads. As Murray parked in a church lot, a man wearing a yellow terry-cloth shirt and bluejeans approached the car. She felt a pang of fear, but at...

The first time I heard a preschooler explaining a classmate’s disruptive behavior, I was surprised at how adult her four-year-old voice sounded. Her classmate “doesn’t know how to sit still and listen,” she said to me, while I sat at the snack table with them. He couldn’t learn because he couldn’t follow directions, she explained, as if she had recently completed a behavioral assessment on him. Months before either of these children would start...

Abstract: Stressful stimuli in healthy subjects trigger activation of a consistent and reproducible set of brain regions; yet, the notion that there is a single and constant stress neuromatrix is not sustainable. Indeed, after chronic stress exposure there is activation of many brain regions outside that network. This suggests that there is a distinction between the acute and the chronic stress neuromatrix. Herein, a new working model is proposed to understand the shift between these...

Among the many ways racial bias shows up in the American medical system: who receives kidney transplants. (This is true of other organs as well, but we'll only talk about kidneys for now.) Until recently, whites in need of transplants were more likely to receive them than blacks or Hispanics. So in December 2014, officials changed the algorithm that determines who's prioritized for donated kidneys. Now, just about a year later, a new study shows the change worked. The evidence comes from a...

The other evening, snow fell gently as I sat reading in front of our evening fire. My husband had gone to bed, but I savored the sound of silence, save for the crackle of the logs -- utterly content. Content. Wow. Not striving, not planning or making notes, not wishing I'd done something differently, not envisioning a scene for my next book or blog, not unhappy or worried or stressed. When I think about my journey to contentment I am grateful for dogged determination; that reasons for...