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I never cease to be amazed at how a subconscious block – made of old ideas, beliefs, or impressions – can affect present day life. Moreover, it’s possible for a subconscious block to totally sabotage your goals while leaving no clue as to its source. In fact, you may be completely in the dark while said subconscious block has its way with you. That’s why I found hypnotherapist Lora Cheadle’s article about goals and subconscious blocks to be so interesting. I sent Lora a note to ask her some...

My first trip to the Robert Taylor Homes—a high-rise housing project on Chicago’s South Side—was after a shooting. Dust blew everywhere because there was no grass to hold down the dirt. The elevator was covered with graffiti and stank of urine. There were police cars and an ambulance in front of the 16-story building, which was one of a complex of 28 concrete towers that comprised an enormous public housing development. At one point, more than 20,000 people lived there. That was nearly 30...

A unique partnership aimed at the health and welfare of children exposed to trauma due to violence launched July 7, 2016. Adverse Childhood Experiences Response Team (ACERT), a response team that can be deployed to serve children who have been exposed to violence is the first initiative of its kind in the United States. The initiative was made possible by a three-year $150,000 grant from the HNH Foundation to Project LAUNCH (Linking Action for Unmet Needs in Children’s Health) at Manchester...

In 2016, I celebrated 35 years recovery from the eating disorders I’d grappled with from the ages of 16–28. I was 63 years old. But as I shared in my last post, “ When ACEs are Rooted in Secondhand Drinking ,” I was into my 40s before I realized my anorexia and bulimia were the symptoms of, and soothers for, my deeper, unresolved issues. First recovery: learning to re-eat As always, my eating disorders recovery “celebration” last year consisted of quiet kudos to self on Thanksgiving Day. I...

There's no way to avoid it. As the cost of college grows, research shows that so does the number of hungry and homeless students at colleges and universities across the country. Still, many say the problem is invisible to the public. "It's invisible even to me and I'm looking," says Wick Sloan. He came to Bunker Hill Community College in Boston more than a decade ago to teach English full time. He says it felt like he quickly became a part-time social worker, too. "When I first got here, I...

If you've ever turned on your favorite song to boost your mood when you're feeling down, the results of a new, small study probably won't surprise you. The research found that the pleasure you feel when you listen to music is triggered by the same brain chemical system that provides the good feelings associated with sex, recreational drugs and food. The study is the first to show that the brain's "opioid system" is directly involved in musical pleasure, according to the researchers at McGill...

One’s kicking himself over an unrequited lifelong crush. One dreams of being a Navy SEAL. Another leads you on a mocking tour of his new home. They’d seem like typical teenage boys — if they weren’t awaiting trial for violent crimes. Juan Gamez, Antonio Hernandez and Jarad Nava are the youthful offenders at the heart of “ They Call Us Monsters ,” a new documentary that follows their lives in a Los Angeles juvenile detention center. They’re held in a special wing of the lockup reserved for...

Last year, a study doubled previous estimates of the transgender population in the United States, putting the figure at 1.4 million, or about 0.6% of the population. A recent Gallup poll shows the percentage of LGBTQ+ adults in the U.S. increased from 3.5% in 2012 to 4.1% in 2016. In 2015, Fusion’s Massive Millennial Poll found half of 1,000 people ages 18-34 saw gender as a nonbinary spectrum. These increased numbers likely result from a general increase in acceptance of LGBTQ+ identities,...

Before Hurricane Katrina I knew a perpetually sad-faced third-grader at Lawrence D. Crocker Elementary School. There was no apparent neglect. His clothes were always clean. He was always perfectly groomed. And even if you gave him a book many years above his grade level, he could handle every word flawlessly. Some may have considered him the ideal student. But he never, ever smiled. His teacher wondered if the school's social worker might investigate why a child so young never expressed...

To help disadvantaged teens and young adults land jobs, an Anchorage mental health provider is staking out ground in the high-tech farming fields of hydroponics and vertical gardening. Inside a warehouse off Arctic Boulevard last month, violet light bathed rows of tall white columns. Leafy greens poked out in vertical rows, marked with handwritten labels for romaine lettuce and parsley. Michael Sobocinski, the chief operating officer of Anchorage Community Mental Health Services, gestured to...

If you are looking for a simple and colorful way to track your mental health, Keira Bailey has a suggestion. On January 8, the 16-year-old began tracking her days using a handmade chart that categorizes the daily state of her mental health by color. Her brother saw Bailey’s tracker and shared it on Twitter, where it took off with more than 7,ooo retweets and 14,000 favorites. The tracker, based off of a Pinterest “ Year in Pixels ” template, features eight different categories: “amazing,...

Carmela Torres was 18 when she became pregnant for the first time. It was 1987 and she and her now-husband, Pablo Hernandez, were two idealistic young Colombians born in the coastal region of Montería who moved to the capital, Bogotá, in search of freedom and a better life. When Torres told her father she was expecting, so angered was he by the thought of his daughter having a child out of wedlock that they didn’t speak to each other for years. Torres remained undaunted. Her pregnancy was...