Blog

The teenage brain has been characterized as a risk-taking machine, looking for quick rewards and thrills instead of acting responsibly. But these behaviors could actually make teens better than adults at certain kinds of learning. "In neuroscience, we tend to think that if healthy brains act in a certain way, there should be a reason for it," says Juliet Davidow, a postdoctoral researcher at Harvard University in the Affective Neuroscience and Development Lab and the lead author of the study...

One in five Army kids will need mental health treatment within the first 15 to 16 years of their lives, said the Army’s director of psychological health. But there continues to be a nationwide shortage of child psychologists and child psychiatrists, affecting not just the military community, but the civilian community at large. “We have a mismatch in what we need and what the nation can provide,” said Dr. Christopher Ivany, a doctor who is also chief of the Behavioral Health Division/Service...

A New Jersey state commission focused on college affordability unveiled a report last week urging the state’s controversial student loan agency to offer better protections for borrowers. Over 18 months, the commission received testimony from students and families, including many who shared their frustration with the lending practices of the state agency, the Higher Education Student Assistance Authority, or HESAA. “We got an earful and we tried to come out with suggestions that really go...

The Bitterroot Cares For Kids Network is the "backbone organization" of the newly established Elevate Montana Bitterroot Affiliate , and they are on the run! The Bitterroot Cares for Kids Network is starting support programming as a follow-up to their August conference on Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs) “ACEs in the Bitterroot.” The conference was on identifying, preventing and alleviating the consequences of childhood abuse and neglect. The first support programming is a book-club type...

Won't it depress people? Isn't it triggering? Aren't the topics troubling? Won't it make people sad or upset? Fear is what i often fight when talking about ACEs. It's not my fear though. It's the fear others have about all things ACEs. Adversity. Abuse. Addiction. Abandonment. Neglect. Dsyfunction. I don't think this fear actually belongs to those of us who have lived with ACEs-who have lived through ACEs-who live with the aftermath of ACEs as adults. When I found out about the ACEs I was...

Rates of depression and suicide are strikingly high among doctors, and The National Academy of Medicine wants to help the profession talk about it. In June, it published " Breaking The Culture of Silence on Physician Suicide ," an exploration of the 2013 suicide of a third-year medical student, Kaitlyn Elkins. And now, it has re-posted Dr. Elisabeth Poorman's recent CommonHealth piece — "I Felt Alone But I Wasn't: Depression Is Rampant Among Doctors In Training" — at the top of its website.

In parts of the 19 states where the practice is still legal, corporal punishment in schools is used as much as 50 percent more frequently on children who are African American or who have disabilities, a new analysis of 160,000 cases during 2013-2014 has found. Corporal punishment — typically striking a child with a wooden paddle — continues to be a widespread practice in disciplining children from pre-K through high school, according to a new study by Elizabeth Gershoff of The University of...

[Photo by CDC Global ] Baltimore, October 4, 2016--A staggeringly high proportion -- 43 percent or 250 million -- of children under age five and living in low- and middle-income countries may not reach their developmental potential due to poverty and chronic under nutrition, according to the latest series on early child development, Advancing Early Childhood Development, published today in The Lancet. "New evidence presented in this Series underscores how influential the early years of life,...

Earlier this week, the World Bank released its first annual Poverty and Shared Prosperity report on global trends in poverty. First, the good news: In 2013, there were 767 million people, or 10.7 percent of the global population, living in extreme poverty (defined as under $1.90 a day), which represents a decline of 1.7 percentage points (and about 100 million people) from 2012. In fact, global poverty rates have actually been on the decline since 1990 — the World Bank calculates that 1.1...

When I was a baby and I got upset, I was totally dependent on bigger, stronger, wiser and kind adults to regulate my stress. But the adults in my life were none of those things and I could not depend on them to understand or meet my needs. Without someone to reliably buffer my stress, I grew to feel unloveable, hopeless and helpless. Because my cries for help were often not answered, I gave up asking for help and now I find it hard to trust people and feel like I have to do everything...

Every family in Vermont wants its children to grow up healthy, happy and protected from anything that might lead to illness and chronic disease. Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs) are preventable and children can prosper with the right support. As we learn more about ACEs we understand that dealing a winning hand for kids doesn’t have to be a game of chance. We have long known that Adverse Childhood Experiences or ACEs, have negative mental health effects on children. We now begin to...

Soon after Nadine Burke Harris opened a pediatrics clinic in a low-income neighborhood in San Francisco, she began grappling with the high rates of asthma and other illnesses that she was diagnosing in her patients. She wanted to understand why so many of the kids she saw were so sick. “They would have chronic abdominal pain, headaches, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, opposition defiant disorder,” she said. “It could be that all these different kids have all these diagnoses, or it...