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The good news is that deaths from drug overdoses in America have been falling slightly for the past six months, granting a reprieve from what seemed like an opioid epidemic with no end in sight. The bad news is that no one knows why, or if this trend will continue. Preliminary figures reported by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention this week show that compared with the 12 months ending September 2017, opioid deaths are down 2.8 percent in the 12 months that ended March 2018,...

"Never ran, never will!" is the gangster-bravado motto that people use to explain Brownsville, Brooklyn, with its blocks and blocks of low-income housing projects. Even the grungiest hipster artisans, who've pretty much invaded Brooklyn in recent years, still stay away from Brownsville. Growing up there in the crack era of the 1980s, Joseph Wilson was surrounded by crack dealers and addicts. His mother was an addict, so his grandmother wound up raising him—and teaching him to love music. She...

There’s a lot that’s indisputable about childhood trauma. Emotional or physical abuse early in life impacts health outcomes as children grow up. Community- and family-based approaches to dealing with trauma are better than institutional settings. And children of color are more likely to face traumatizing childhood experiences. Those events can include something as common as divorce, but also encompass circumstances such as having an incarcerated parent, living with someone with a substance...

Adults in their 40s and 50s with higher levels of cortisol -- a hormone linked to stress -- performed worse on memory and other cognitive tasks than peers of the same age with average cortisol levels, research found. Higher cortisol in the blood also was associated with smaller brain volumes, according to the study, published Oct. 24 in Neurology, the medical journal of the American Academy of Neurology. "In our quest to understand cognitive aging, one of the factors attracting significant...

All youth require the support and acceptance of their family, peers, and communities to thrive. Transgender and gender-nonconforming youth are no exception; their health and well-being is heavily influenced by the institutions and communities that surround them. Although youth who identify as a gender other than the one assigned to them at birth have among the highest rates of suicide, depression, and self-harm , a supportive and safe environment can significantly reduce these risk s.

The plague of mass incarceration in the United States has captured national attention, with substantial bipartisan support to resolve this crisis. Even as we recognize the problem, however, it is important to think critically about proposed alternatives. There is a growing consensus among developmental researchers and juvenile justice decision-makers that incarceration is particularly damaging to youth. Thankfully many jurisdictions are moving away from their historic reliance on secure,...

Anxiety is normal and healthy. When we’re presented with something dangerous in the world, our anxiety response protects us from danger. It makes us hyperaware and primed for action — the “fight or flight” response. Anxiety disorders arise when we develop out-of-proportion anxiety responses to things most of us cope with easily and that happen every day. The core symptoms of anxiety are worry, difficulty tolerating uncertainty, an overactive response to perceived threats (including freezing)...

Supporting Families Impacted by Incarceration: A Dialogue With Experts CANTASD hosted a discussion among experts and practitioners in the field to discuss the impact of parental incarceration on children and families. The result was a 7-page report, Supporting Families Impacted by Incarceration: A Dialogue With Experts, that identifies needed resources and tools to support children and families impacted by incarceration, as well as the workforce. It also offers a practical framework of key...

Larrecsa Cox is a paramedic, but instead of an ambulance with flashing lights and sirens, she drives around in an old, white sedan. Her first call on a recent day in Huntington, W.Va, was to a quiet, middle-class neighborhood. "He overdosed yesterday," Cox says. "And I think we've been here before. I'm almost 100 percent sure we've been to this house before." [For more on this story by SARAH MCCAMMON, go to...

Imagine trying to write your name so that it can be read in a mirror. Your brain has all of the visual information you need, and you're a pro at writing your own name. Still, this task is very difficult for most people. That's because it requires the brain to perform a mental transformation that it's not familiar with: using what it sees in the mirror to accurately guide your hand to write backward. MIT neuroscientists have now discovered how the brain tries to compensate for its poor...

Efforts by the private sector have potential to close the gap in health equity in the United States. That was the message at the recent Culture of Health (COH) Conference, one of several yearly convening meetings under the three-year Building a Culture of Health: A Business Leadership Imperative initiative, a joint program developed between Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and Harvard Business School (HBS) under the leadership of Principal Investigator Howard Koh , Fineberg...