Blog

The classic response for troubled students is reactive. Discipline. A trip to the vice principal’s office. Suspension. And, sometimes, expulsion. But more than 20 years of research on what causes students to become troubled shows that approach doesn’t work. The question, then, has been: What does? A U.S. Centers for Disease Control study looked at childhood traumas, known as adverse childhood experiences (ACEs), and the effects they have on young people as they grow up. A new initiative in...

In July 2013, a man arrived in the emergency room of a California hospital seeking treatment for his child. But when the intern on call walked in to see him, the father looked at her name tag and demanded another physician. As a Palestinian, he didn’t want his child treated by a Jewish doctor. The intern turned to her resident supervisor, Emily Whitgob, who told her colleagues about the incident. The episode helped motivate Whitgob to study how doctors in training and their institutions...

The US National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) has a new director. On September 12, psychiatrist Joshua Gordon took the reins at the institute, which has a budget of US$1.5 billion. He previously researched how genes predispose people to psychiatric illnesses by acting on neural circuits, at Columbia University in New York. His predecessor, Thomas Insel, left the NIMH to join Verily Life Sciences , a start-up owned by Google’s parent company Alphabet, in 2015. Gordon says that his...

Near a wooden “Death Row” signpost towering in an orange-lit fog, 25 young people huddled together, smiling and laughing. Few would guess the crowd waiting to enter the Los Angeles Haunted Hayride and Corn Maze was almost entirely made up of formerly incarcerated youth whose daily lives are in some ways more surreal than a scary event. Used to a totally regulated life on the inside, they are uncertain how to navigate life on the outside again. “You’re literally emerging from a time capsule,”...

There is a movement taking shape across the country when it comes to ministry settings: becoming trauma-informed . I am personally invested in this movement and I am intrigued by the ways I see connections between Jesus’ teachings and trauma-informed ministry principles. In the first post in the series, I focused only the first identifier of a trauma-informed ministry: the realization of the widespread impact of trauma and potential paths for recovery. In the second and third posts, I...

FREE Trauma-informed Train-theTrainer Opportunity for Your Court! Deadline 11/18 The National Association of Drug Court Professionals (NADCP) is pleased to share with you an exciting professional train-the-trainer opportunity focused on developing trauma-informed responses to justice-involved adult men and women. This opportunity is offered by the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA) GAINS Center for Behavioral Health and Justice Transformation . This free event...

I became a professional reader long before I was a writer when I was living in homeless shelters, subsidized housing, and welfare hotels with my mother in New York City. Most of the middle class and affluent black folks I would come to know in the future would wince and give me a look I couldn’t read when I would tell the story that I outline in my new memoir, The Beautiful Darkness: A Handbook for Orphans . All some intolerant, ignorant bigots need is to continue to hear about the...

In New York, one in five people —around 1.6 million—struggle with mental illness. A new program launched this week aims to give each of them a way to do something about it. NYC Well , part of New York’s $850 million comprehensive mental health plan , ThriveNYC , makes free, round-the-clock counseling available via phone, text, or online chat;conversations with trained counselors are confidential and accessible in over 200 languages. [For more of this story, written by Ellie Anzilotti, go to ...

Jackie has decided to be an ice-cream cone. And why not? Who doesn't love ice cream? Carolyn is going to be a puppy. One of her favorite words so far is "woof," so this makes sense, totally. We have two superheroes this year. Superman is Milo; his cousin Spider-Man is Leo — in case you've been wondering about the super-super-secret identities of these champions for justice. Clayton — at age 8, the eldest grandson — will terrorize younger children as the Grim Reaper. Or not. He is the...

People fleeing big coastal cities like L.A. and San Francisco in search of more affordable housing inland could be in for sticker shock. A new report released Tuesday reveals that inland, rural parts of California are increasingly unaffordable too. "That came as a big surprise because historically we have thought of the housing problem as being a focus in larger cities, but we found every city has this problem," said Jonathan Woetzel, director of the McKinsey Global Institute and a co-author...

As a graduate student at Harvard in the mid-1990s, I participated in research studies carried out by the psychology department that began in October 1996 and continued until August 2005 to interview adults who had experience sexual abuse as children and learn what effects the abuse had had on their lives. Although I was sure I knew what I would discover—that the abuse would be remembered as a horrible experience that overwhelmed the people I interviewed with fear when it happened and had...

Dustin French, 29, had four drug overdoses in the span of a year. “I was dead on arrival to the hospital,” he said of his last heroin overdose, which happened in April. “I woke up … and I didn’t feel like myself. I could tell this time I was really dead.” Now, he says, he’s 100 days clean. He lives with his girlfriend. And he has three sons: an 8-year-old, a 2-year-old and a 1-year-old. He credits his turnaround to a relationship he launched in the emergency department with a “peer recovery...