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A couple of months ago, I was invited to participate in an event at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, S.C., which was the site of a racially motivated shooting earlier this year. The purpose of the event was to bring together stakeholders from legal/judicial, health care, public health, law enforcement, political, faith and other communities to address gun violence prevention . From the time I started preparing for this event in early October until it actually...

Divorce can have a multitude of short-term negative effects on children, including anxiety, anger, shock and disbelief. New Penn State research indicates parental divorce can have long-lasting impacts and even influence the health of adult children. According to Jason Thomas, assistant professor of sociology and demography, decades of research shows that parental divorce can negatively impact outcomes from early childhood. However, little study has been done on the timing of parental divorce...

This was the third time I had seen him this month alone. It was the same story as before; he was hospitalized and provided a short supply of medication at discharge. Now, he was back in the emergency department, intoxicated, talking to himself, and disheveled. He tells us he drinks to quiet the voices, a common story. Self-medicating with drugs and alcohol to “smooth out the rough spots” or “quiet the voices,” is not uncommon for people without access to appropriate...

Detroit has the highest rate of asthma among young children in America’s 18 largest cities, a problem that experts link to urban ills that could affect their health and learning for the rest of their lives. In a study done exclusively for The Detroit News and PBS NewsHour, researchers from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health found about 2 of every 3 Motor City children face “adverse childhood experiences,” such as household substance abuse, exposure to...

Emotional health, says parent coach Krissy Pozatek, means accepting the full range of human emotions, both the painful and the positive. For parents who wish their children nothing but happiness, that can be difficult. When my daughter was four, she said to me, “Mommy, I’m worried.” She had tension in her voice and fear in her eyes. Concerned, I asked, “Sweetie, what are you worried about?” With mounting frustration, she replied, “I don’t...

The Raising of America series is a five-part documentary series that explores the question: Why are so many children in America faring so poorly? What are the consequences for the nation’s future? How might we, as a nation, do better? The series investigates these questions through different lenses: What does science tell us about the enduring importance of early life experiences on the brain and body? What it is like to be a parent today? And what policies and structures help or...

Divorce, neglect, emotional or physical abuse, poverty, all instances of Adverse Childhood Experiences, or ACE. It is  a term defined by the CDC and linked not only to trauma as a child, but profound effects on your health and well-being as an adult. Experts also say it further indication we need to be mindful of the situations we are creating for our children, not only for their benefit and care now, but for their future. "The research again culminated in an awareness that trauma...

Mass shootings and police shootings have spurred calls for authorities to take action to reduce the violence. But policymakers may be stymied by the dearth of public health research into both gun violence and deaths that involve the police. One big obstacle: congressional restrictions on funding of such research at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Right now, the CDC studies all kinds of violence. There's a program on child abuse and youth violence, and the public health agency...

In a brick plaza next to the Chelsea, Massachusetts city hall, Anthony, a bald but still-youthful man in grey sweats, tells me he spent the previous night in the hospital for what he says was his twelfth overdose. Anthony and other users of illegal drugs agreed to speak to NPR for this story on the condition that we use only their first names. He blames his overdose on what his dealer told him was a particularly strong bag of heroin laced with the anesthesia drug fentanyl — or...

If you pull into Hertford County High School in northeastern North Carolina, pass the bus circle and the soccer fields, and continue to a patch of woods, you find three, cheerful, two-story apartment buildings. Knock on any door here and you'll find the home of a teacher or employee of the local school district. North Carolina has some of the lowest teacher salaries in the country. Combine that with a housing shortage in this rural county, and that creates a big problem. So local leaders...

How stressful is medical training? So bad that in a class that encouraged medical students to express their feelings by drawing comics, nearly half of them depicted their supervisors as monsters, researchers say. Students imagined the workplace as dank dungeons, represented supervising physicians as fiendish, foul-mouthed monsters, and themselves as sleep-deprived zombies walking through barren post-apocalyptic landscapes, the study authors, Daniel R. George and Dr. Michael Green, wrote...

Since 1993, 11 people have been killed in abortion-related attacks—doctors, clinic staff, and, just the other week, a police officer and two visitors in the line of fire at a Planned Parenthood clinic in Colorado Springs. While the investigation continues into the shooter’s background and motives, David Cohen , a law professor at Drexel University, says that stalking and harassment pose a much more common threat to abortion providers and their families. For their May 2015 book...