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ABSTRACT. This article is an adaptation of a chapter from the author’s 2005 book, The Living Stage: A Step by Step Guide to Psychodrama, Sociometry, and Experiential Group Therapy. The author proposes the use of psychodrama to help clients in recovery who are dealing with complicated grief issues associated with addiction and addition related trauma. She emphasizes the importance of grieving and recognizes the many causes for a client’s grief, ranging from death to divorce to addiction...

It is both remarkable and natural that the theme of the 2018 Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration’s (SAMHSA) May 10th Children’s Mental Health Awareness Day event was “Partnering for Health and Hope Following Trauma”—remarkable to hear “ACEs” and “trauma-informed” roll off the tongues of all the federal officials (some seasoned, some new appointees in the Trump Administration) and natural as the awareness of ACEs science grows at lighting speed…at least it feels that way.

Shanel Lindsay is excited. The Boston-based marijuana legalization advocate and owner of Ardent LLC , a medical cannabis device company, is confident that her home state is laying the groundwork for the first statewide marijuana marketplace that will truly compensate communities that were most devastated by the War on Drugs . "This is an industry that presents a high opportunity to build wealth, probably one of the few brand new industries that will come along in our working lifetimes," says...

February's mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla., which left 17 dead and 17 more wounded, horrified people across the country, spurring student walkouts and marches in support of stricter gun control laws, including universal, comprehensive background checks and a ban on assault weapons. But gun debates in the United States have proven to be contentious and intractable. Even as thousands rally for new legislation, opponents contend that such measures won't...

One could argue that parenting, for Black women, is an act of political warfare. Women of color-led organizations have been working for decades to disrupt the toxic narrative around Black motherhood, a critical step toward dismantling the white supremacy stronghold—but it remains a steep hill to climb. Launched this week, Forward Together’s eighth annual Mamas Day celebration is honoring Black motherhood in all its forms and the right to parent . To commemorate the celebration, artists...

The first time I am arrested, I am 12 years old. One sentence and I am back there, all that little girl fear and humiliation forever settled in me at the cellular level. It’s the break between seventh and eighth grades, and for the first time I have to attend summer school because of my math and science grades, and I am angry about it. No other Millikan kids come here, to this school in Van Nuys, for remediation, only me. The summer school I attend is for the kids who live in my...

Federal officials lost track of nearly 1,500 migrant children last year after a government agency placed the minors in the homes of adult sponsors in communities across the country, according to testimony before a Senate subcommittee Thursday. The Health and Human Services Department has a limited budget to track the welfare of vulnerable unaccompanied minors, and realized that 1,475 children could not be found after making follow-up calls to check on their safety, an agency official said.

Last week, a prototype of a simple, 360-square-foot dwelling called the Plugin House appeared outside Boston City Hall. The crisp white box, unfurnished but with portals for plumbing and electricity ready to go, took about 5 hours for a five-person team to assemble. It’s the brainchild of James Shen , who is in Boston this year from China as a Loeb Fellow at Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design, and it represents something significant: In a city where everything from roof decks to...

Among the homes, schools, daycare centers, and churches of Los Angeles' Wilmington neighborhood, hundreds of pumpjacks extract oil, their dinosaur-like heads bobbing up and down. A predominately working-class and Latino immigrant community of 58,000, Wilmington sits atop the third-largest oil field in the continental United States. Five oil refineries release steam from nearly 200-foot stacks, their pipes and tanks clanging and hissing. Many of Wilmington's residents work in the oil industry...

What happens when you don’t blame kids for bad behavior? An elementary school in Columbus, Ohio is trying to find out. Katherine Reynolds Lewis writes: The Ohio-based photographer Maddie McGarvey spent a couple days at Ohio Ave recently meeting and spending time with the students, teachers, and administration trying to shift teachers’ perspective on trauma and their relationships with children. “How are [the children] going to learn a positive way of dealing with conflict if we’re not the...

For Public Health and Health Professions Research Day at the University of Florida, I connected with Peace4Tarpon (P4T) to look into some of the data they had been collecting since since early 2016. I did this as part of my final internship for the Master of Public Health program. In surveys that Peace4Tarpon had been distributing through meetings and outreach, they had been collecting demographic information and ACEs data. ACEs have also been measured on a national scale through the 2010...

The University of Florida has fostered a strong relationship with Peace4Tarpon, through the College of Public Health and Health Professions, for a few years now. Recently, the conversations between the two were focused on how they could partner to take the aims and methods of the trauma-informed initiative beyond Tarpon Springs and into a more accessible, formal format. This sparked the idea to create a course available to learners who can take the information and spread the culture of...