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Juvenile drug treatment courts must do more to bring families into the treatment process if they want to help young offenders overcome addiction and stay out of the criminal justice system, a team of mental health professionals concluded in a sweeping report released today. Using a survey of 158 drug courts in 38 states as a backdrop, the report highlights the need to improve the current approach to treatment and presents a set of tools to help courts incorporate family-involved treatment...

Within the next month, I will be making available a draft version of an adult Sunday School curriculum that will introduce the concept of trauma-informed ministry to churches. If there are members of ACEsConnection that would like to "test run" the curriculum, I'd be honored if you'd reach out to me in the comments section or via a direct message. Email works, too! Just send to chrish@intermountain.org. The curriculum just takes a look at the "slice" of trauma-informed ministry that I am...

Latino students in kindergarten trail their white peers in math by approximately three months’ worth of learning, a new study by Child Trends Hispanic Institute has found. Researchers drew a nationally representative sample of students from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study, Kindergarten Class of 2010-2011 who were followed through the end of their fifth-grade year. Sixty-two percent of the 2,199 Latino students studied had at least one foreign-born parent, and 45 percent spoke only...

Some foreign-born Californians are canceling their Medi-Cal coverage or declining to enroll in the first place, citing fears of a Trump administration crackdown on immigrants. Among those dropping coverage are people in the country legally but concerned about jeopardizing family members who lack permanent legal status, according to government officials, immigration attorneys and health care advocates. Others worry they will be penalized in the future for using public benefits such as...

Dorothea Dix was a trailblazer who railed against the inhumane treatment of people with mental illnesses. Shocked by the sight of people with illnesses shackled in jails, she advocated for compassion, not punishment, and helped establish the model for the mental hospitals we have today. That was about 200 years ago. How is it, then, that we’re still applying a 19th-century approach to a problem in the 21st century? Today, we know more and we can do more. People with mental illnesses have...

When a tree fell in July 2016 and destroyed her family’s mobile home in Leicester, Kwana Bailey considered giving up. Perhaps it was time to throw in the towel, the mother of six wondered. Maybe she should take her kids and camp out in front of social services until someone came to their aid. Her landlord was refusing to fix the property, and being homeless for the second time was a setback she wasn’t sure she could handle. Then, Bailey remembered why she cleaned up her act in the first...

Teenage suicides are unspeakable tragedies, and they’re far from uncommon. According to government statistics , suicide is the second most common cause of death among 15- to 24-year-olds. While psychologists and other counselors have done invaluable work to reduce this risk, new research finds a different group of professionals has had an enormous positive impact: state legislators. It reports the suicide rate among high school students decreases significantly after a state law legalizing...

Researchers, students, mental health professionals and religious leaders will gather at the East Lansing Marriott at University Place, April 13-14 to attend the ninth annual Muslim Mental Health Conference. The conference was created to promote awareness and acceptance of mental illnesses, fight stigma and improve access to treatment for members of the Muslim community. Farha Abbasi, assistant professor of psychiatry and founding director of the conference, says that because of the vital...

This post was authored by guest blogger, Wendy Ellis, DrPH (c), MPH , Project Director at Building Community Resilience (BCR) and Co-Principal Investigator with Dr. William Dietz on the BCR project. Mark and Diane* once had thriving jobs in an Ohio manufacturing plant until a car accident left them with severe back injuries and unable to work. Ineligible to receive workman’s compensation, the couple and their young children, Emma (5), Ava (7) and Lucas (10), quickly lost their livelihood,...

Judges have been meditating before taking the bench, and opening their courtroom with a moment of meditative silence. Lawyers in tense divorce negotiations have been more effective by maintaining a perspective of mindful reflection throughout the process. Courses offered at a dozen law schools have given law students an introduction to meditation—an effort to help them sharpen their legal skills and make them more effective trial lawyers, negotiators, and mediators. All these steps are part...

Kim Smith has been dancing since she was 2 years old and teaching dance for decades. So it broke her heart when her youngest daughter Ragan never quite fit in in the classes she tried. “I was trying to find a program for Ragan, but she is autistic and has a short attention span,” Smith tells PEOPLE. So Smith, 50, created a class for Ragan, 7, and other kids with special needs like her in Charlotte, North Carolina. This spring, 10 of the kids will compete in a traditional dance competition.

A New Report—and a Landmark for the SEL Field Working in close collaboration with the faculty of education at the University of British Columbia (UBC), in February 2017 CASEL announced the publication of a new report titled To Reach the Students, Teach the Teachers: A National Scan of Teacher Preparation and Social & Emotional Learning . CASEL funded the research for the report, the first-ever scan of teacher preparation related to SEL, as part of a grant from NoVo Foundation. Retrieved...