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It's taking the stigma out of mental illness. What would you do if your teenage son or daughter began expressing paranoid thoughts? Jumbling their sentences? Exhibiting bizarre behavior? Few parents know the warning signs of psychosis, but one joint effort in Connecticut is aiming to change that. The state’s Department of Mental Health & Addiction Services and Yale University are pioneering MindMap , an outreach program designed to catch the early signs of a young person experiencing a...

People in remote areas have long lacked access to mental health services. The movement to fix that is showing signs of life. In 1963 when President John F. Kennedy signed the Community Mental Health Act, the effect of the law was to shift mental health care away from large, state-run mental institutions and place it in communities where the focus would be on prevention as well as treatment. But Congress never adequately funded the mental health services that were needed to support the law.

A free food project on New York's waterways challenges residents to imagine how we might adapt to a more resource-constrained world. n New York City, where land is valuable and developers can rake in big profits, community gardens are being uprooted to make way for more profitable ventures. As a result, some families are losing a key source of fresh food. But what if members of the public had access to a site where they could pick freshly grown fruits and vegetables for free? And what if the...

Setting preschoolers up for success takes more than good teachers — it also takes effective parenting. That’s why New York City — which has already been lauded for its focus on teacher training and quality in pre-K — is turning its sights to the home. This school year, the Department of Education and New York University will launch a new parenting program to help low-income families reinforce classroom lessons at home. Called ParentCorps, the research-backed initiative brings parents,...

Boston Public Schools — faced with thousands of students who have experienced trauma — is building a team that will help 
kids overcome emotional 
and social obstacles with a $1.6 million federal grant. “We have great opportunity to be able to notice students who may have been influenced by trauma,” 
BPS Superintendent Tommy Chang told the Herald. “The reality is, students can be influenced by trauma through so many different things.” [For more of this story, written by Chris Villani, go to ...

The trustees of the State University of New York voted on Wednesday to completely remove long-standing questions about past felony convictions from its general application starting with the fall 2018 admissions cycle, a decision that could have ripple effects across academia. The change affects 64 colleges in the statewide system that enrolls 442,000 students each year and received 310,000 applications for the 2015 academic year. “This is a historic moment because SUNY is the first...

The idea of free college is garnering more attention as presidential hopeful Hillary Clinton works the crowd-pleasing concept into her campaign stump speeches. It was a tenet of Bernie Sanders’s attempt to secure the Democratic nomination. And it’s a prospect that seems to be gaining broader support from families as college costs and student debt rise. This week, as he rolled across the country in a big yellow bus on his “back-to-school” tour, U.S. Education Secretary John King used a stop...

Children in the state's welfare system are being warehoused in psychiatric hospitals and emergency shelters hundreds of days longer than they should be in many cases because the agency does not have a place for them, a new report found. The highly critical review of Illinois' Department of Children and Family Services came from the state auditor general's office, even though DCFS did not track and could not provide most of the information the auditors sought, according to the report released...

One evening this June, I found myself on the roof of a bombed-out hospital in Aleppo. It was pitch black because the city’s east side is without electricity. My colleagues and I watched jets fly by, dropping bombs on the outskirts of the besieged region. Exploding rockets could be heard throughout the night. I’m a pediatrician in Chicago. But this summer, I traveled with two colleagues from the Syrian American Medical Society (SAMS) to Aleppo. There, I saw firsthand the way this war is...

People often say they couldn’t do my job. I frequently wonder how I do. There are times I dread going in, times I can’t sleep at night because I’m worrying about a patient and days where I can laugh and cry intermittently. Every day feels like a gamble working as a community mental health nurse, not knowing what to expect. Take Friday as an example. My diary was packed. Any sensible community nurse knows to keep this day as free as possible. With paperwork on the rise, I try to reserve a few...

Gail Kennedy , our own director of programs here at ACEsConnection, shared this fantastic resource with me last week. It's called: Trauma-Informed Parenting: Supplemental Resources and is available through the National Child Traumatic Stress Network (NCTSN) . It was originally called Caring for Children Who Have Experienced Trauma and as part of a workshop for resource parents in the child welfare system. Resource parents, I believe, are foster parents, adoptive parents and those doing...

Men and boys in the U.S. account for 78 percent of all suicides , 80 percent of fatal heroin overdoses , and 98 percent of mass shooters . While suicides , substance use , and mass violence show variation by race/ethnicity, but the dominance of men is consistent in all categories. I t’s time to amplify the conversation about social norms, when it comes to masculinity. In the United States, expectations for boys tend to center on dominance, control, avoiding weakness, and restricting or...