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GettinG Started. the San Francisco Department of public health (SFDph)’s “trauma-informed Systems” (tiS) initiative began in 2012 with a workgroup commissioned by the Department’s Director, Barbara garcia, and chaired by Dr. Ken Epstein, Director of Children, Youth and Families. SFDph recognized trauma and toxic stress as a critical health concerns, with detrimental effects on agencies, people served, and across generations. [For more go to ...

With fatal drug overdoses at alarming levels in New York City, particularly from opiates like heroin, Mayor Bill de Blasio on Monday vowed to reverse the tide and reduce the number of deaths by 35 percent over five years through a combination of outreach, treatment and law enforcement. The plan, alluded to in Mr. de Blasio’s state of the city address last month, would see the city spend as much as $38 million a year on a broad array of services, including expanded methadone and buprenorphine...

When Donna Helen Crisp, a 59-year-old nursing professor, entered a North Carolina teaching hospital for a routine hysterectomy in 2007, she expected to come home the next day. Instead, Crisp spent weeks in a coma and underwent five surgeries to correct a near-fatal cascade of medical errors that left her with permanent injuries. Desperate for an explanation, Crisp, who is also a lawyer, said she repeatedly encountered a white wall of silence: The hospital and her surgeon refused to say...

Midway through services on a Sunday morning in March, the congregants of the Cosmopolitan Church of the Lord Jesus rise from the pews, lift their hands, punch the air, and sway from side to side. They’re not praying: These West Bronx churchgoers—mostly older black women, many in bright wool jackets and fur-trimmed hats—are taking an exercise break. For ten minutes, the parishioners twist their torsos (12 repetitions each) and march in place. Soon, the pastel-colored windows have faintly...

When my parents sent my brother and me off to college in upstate South Carolina back in 2008, they gave us — their black, 18-year-old twin sons — a warning: Be careful around white women. And why wouldn’t they say this? Their words were meant as a talisman, one that black parents have been passing to their black sons for centuries. It wasn’t long ago, after all, that the racial caste system known as Jim Crow punished, and often killed, black men who dared even to make eye contact with a...

Nora Caplan-Bricker reported in the September/October 2015 issue of Pacific Standard that many family health-care providers lacked training in administering one of the most reliable forms of birth control available, the intrauterine device (IUD). One-third reported they’d need more training before they’d feel comfortable recommending one. In October, the Texas Tribune reported on Texas’ new policy allowing its Medicaid program to fund the implantation of IUDs in the delivery room for women...

A bill in Sacramento would make California the first state in the country where drug users could be provided with a place to inject. The bill's author says the measure is aimed at reducing overdoses and other problems caused by drug abuse. "In the U.S. we have criminalized rather than treated addiction as a medical or social issue," said Assemblywoman Susan Eggman (D-Stockton). "Our prisons are full of people suffering from issues of addiction. Being able to provide a safe place for someone...

Preschoolers who get too little sleep may be more likely to have trouble paying attention, controlling their emotions and processing information later in childhood, a new study suggests. By age 7, these sleepless kids had markedly decreased mental and emotional functioning, said study lead researcher Dr. Elsie Taveras. The children exhibited "poorer ability to pay attention, poorer emotional control, poorer executive function in general, and more behavioral problems," said Taveras, chief of...

The Hechinger Report filmed the school at the juvenile detention center in New Orleans after a new group of educators, with a different approach, took over. JJIE and Youth Today have partnered with the Hechinger Report in the past on education projects. [For more of this story go to http://jjie.org/2017/03/15/school-for-new-orleans-juveniles-evolves/]

Hidden Figures is the story of three black women — bona fide geniuses in the fields of mathematics, physics, and engineering — who were instrumental in the 1960s-era Space Race. The stories of Katherine Johnson, Dorothy Vaughan, and Mary Jackson unfolded during a time when few understood — let alone believed — that black women could help put the first American in space, in large part because Jim Crow — and not ability — often stood in the way of black Americans’ quest to make history.

“You can recover from all that happened to you.” That was the dose of hope I received from Sebern Fisher during a short telephone interview. She is the author of Neurofeedback in the Treatment of Developmental Trauma: Calming the Fear-Driven Brain. Her book is excellent even if you never plan on using neurofeedback. She helps explain why and how developmental trauma devastates and how it is different than single-incident trauma or traditional post-traumatic stress. Honestly – if you read her...

School segregation did not end in 1954 with the landmarkBrown v. Board of Education decision. For the past 52 years, the Cleveland, Mississippi, school district has faced ongoing litigation in response to its racially divided high schools and middle schools. After decades of legal battles and failed integration initiatives, a settlement was finalized Monday, creating a single high school on the historically white Cleveland High campus and a single middle school on the historically black East...