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356 pounds?! Are you kidding me, Michael? What the fuck are you doing to yourself? Every morning I would wake up and watch the number on the scale tick up as I slowly allowed obesity to run wild and consume my body. Fat . I was always the chubby kid. I shopped in the boy's husky section at Walmart as a preteen. Husky for the unware is the polite nomenclature for fat kids. I spent summers running around with my shirt on. I ate entire boxes of gummy bears for dinner. I never ordered just one...

You are invited to a free 1 hr. webinar on Wednesday , December 2 from 12 noon to 1:00 pm PST (3:00-4:00 pm EST) on the new ITRC Mental Wellness and Resilience Policy To register for the webinar go to: http://www.theresourceinnovationgroup.org/ Why the Need for a New Climate Change Mental Wellness and Resilience Policy? Climate science indicates that global temperatures will, in the not too distant future, rise above the 2.7-degree F. temperature threshold that unleashes...

N'dea Yancey-Bragg USA TODAY Nov. 5, 2020 A group of medical students at the University of Pittsburgh wrote their own version of the Hippocratic oath which acknowledges system racism in medicine, the coronavirus pandemic and several high profile police killings of African Americans. During their orientation, a group of first-year medical students created a new class oath that the class recited ahead of the symbolic white coat ceremony in August which marked the beginning of their medical...

At Ready4K , we talk and write a lot about parental self-care. It’s absolutely key that every caregiver find time and strategies to de-stress and relax even if it’s just for a few minutes. But did you know that kids need self-care too? So how do we help kids learn to care for themselves? In this article, Ready4K content manager Fran Lartigue provides specific ideas for helping kids learn simple self-care strategies that can last for a lifetime. Read the article >>

These times have been ROUGH for our schools, but we've noticed it's especially challenging for our female school leaders. They are crispy and fried with burnout and struggling to muster the energy to face each new day. For this reason, WE created something to help RIGHT NOW! HERE this NOW is proud to announce its COVID Crisis Leadership Development Program that is designed for female school leaders (though we welcome equity-minded men and those that identify as gender non-conforming) that...

Join me for a 6 week digital discussion group about Laura van Dernoot Lipsky’s amazing book, Trauma Stewardship: An Everyday Guide to Caring for Self While Caring for Others . This book has been a game changer for me throughout my social work career. Impactful, funny, and practical, I have use this book to not only support my own selfcare but also to support teams that I’ve worked with. As I’ve revisited this book, I often find myself wanting to share what I'm learning with others, dive...

An opportunity to learn about trauma -- its impact on youth and on you! Holiday trauma addressed too. CAEOP conference on Dec. 11th (virtual) -- day long. Registration includes a copy of Trauma Doesn't Stop at the School Door (paperback or ebook). Join us. Register here: https://forms.gle/fMA13aPL4SBrWrZy8.

By Elizabeth Amon, The Imprint, November 15, 2020 She had been homeless and struggling with depression and suicidal thoughts over three difficult years, when Elsa St Clair was released in January from an Idaho psychiatric hospital. Today, the 24-year-old enjoys a reliable internet connection in a Spokane apartment that she’s decorated with the flag of Eastern Washington University, where she hopes to study nursing. In preparation for her future career, she is about to start an online...

By Carolyn Jones, EdSource, November 17, 2020 Student misbehavior hasn’t vanished during distance learning, but schools are finding that imposing discipline in a virtual environment is a complicated and often murky process, and that current laws don’t neatly apply to online behavior. The California Department of Education has not yet released suspension and expulsion data from the 2019-20 school year, but teachers and advocates interviewed by EdSource say school discipline, such as...

By J. Brian Charles, The Trace, November 14, 2020 On the first Monday in October, three men came calling for David Ross at his office, located in the University of Maryland’s Medical Center campus in downtown Baltimore. All three men had survived gunshot wounds, and their visits to Ross, a licensed social worker at the hospital’s Violence Intervention Program, could mean that they were looking for socks or hats, necessary items for the coming winter. But on that day, an unseasonably warm...

By Sara Heath, Patient Engagement HIT, November 12, 2020 The American Heart Association (AHA) has issued a Presidential Advisory calling out institutional racism as a cause of premature death from cardiovascular disease, underscoring the problems of racial health disparities, implicit bias, and weathering medicine. The Advisory, published in AHA’s medical journal Circulation, called out racism by name and asserts for better antiracist practices in medicine. Such practices include work to...

By Emma Goldberg, The New York Times, November 12, 2020 Before the pandemic, Aya Raji’s days were jam-packed. She woke up at 6:30 a.m. and took the subway to school. At night, she practiced kick-flips with her skateboarding club and hosted “Twilight” movie nights for friends. Once her school in Brooklyn turned to remote learning, starting last spring and continuing this fall, the days grew long and lonely. Nothing could distract her from the bleak news, as she stared at her laptop for hours...