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On a sunny afternoon in April, I sat on a bench at New York’s City Hall, waiting to interview Mayor Bill de Blasio. He breezed by in shirtsleeves, surrounded by grim-looking advisers. The mayor, too, was frowning. That morning’s papers carried the news that de Blasio’s fundraising activities were being investigated by U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara, the Manhattan district attorney Cyrus Vance, and a state commission on public ethics. The mayor’s new initiative to combat homelessness was being...

Police had picked up Ledwon, 55, in late April from a local shelter in Alamosa, Colorado, where he was hallucinating and speaking garbled Spanish. Likely triggered by a change in medication, Ledwon’s psychotic episode was compounded by crippling anxiety. Police dropped him off in the emergency room—common destination for mental-health patients, but one that may cause as much harm as good. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, mental disorders like Ledwon’s caused 5.3...

Television shows such as Orange is the New Black and Oz frequently depict prison officers as rule-breakers much like the inmates themselves, engaging in inappropriate relationships with prisoners or smuggling drugs inside. But they also depict the challenges of these jobs: maintaining order among an incarcerated and troubled population, dealing with the ups and downs of prisoners’ emotional well-being, and managing facilities in disrepair and people in need with very limited resources. Those...

The first time I was abandoned I was only six years old and I remember the day as if it just happened yesterday. I was sitting on a courtroom floor, cooing over my newborn little sister and making her laugh as I dangled a pearl necklace over her face. My mother and her new husband were sitting on the hard wooden bench directly behind me and I remember hearing Mom groan as a dark haired man in a tan trench coat entered the courtroom. The dark-haired man sat down at the far end of the wooden...

It’s early morning, and the ladies hover around the bus stop gossiping about the day ahead. At 10 years old, I stick close to my aunt Geevie as we wait for the next city bus headed toward Windsor Farms, a part of Richmond, Va., where men don’t mow their own lawns. Geevie and I each hold twine-handled bags filled with goodies to hold us through the day: Baby Ruth candy bars fresh out the freezer, potato chips and two bottles of Coca-Cola. On this day, Geevie wears a billowy floral blouse and...

Consider Waukegan and Stevenson, two Illinois school districts separated by 20 miles — and an enormous financial gulf. Stevenson, mostly white, is flush with resources. The high school has five different spaces for theater performances, two gyms, an Olympic-size pool and an espresso bar. Meanwhile Waukegan, with its mostly minority student body, is struggling. At one school, the band is forced to practice in a hallway, and as many as 28 students share a single computer. [For more of this...

What’s the last conversation you had with a police officer? Chances are it wasn’t about the weather. Or your favorite local cover band. Or their kid’s youth soccer game. Chance are … it was more stressful than not. All that’s about to change, if Sergeant Chis Cognac has anything to say about it. Operating under some simple guidelines (“no speeches, no agenda”), the co-founder of Coffee With a Cop has set out to shift the timbre of police-citizen interactions. “You can talk about crime or you...

[Ed. note: This is cross-posted from the ACEs in Education group, where Leisa Irwin is the community editor. If you want more information about trauma-informed schools, please join the ACEs in Education group.] I recently wrote a blog post about how to take the first step in creating a trauma informed care model (TIC) in your school. The first step, Establishing a Baseline, is necessary because it fuels future steps in the process. In the blog post "Is Your School Ready to be Trauma Informed...

Check out NPR's interactive app exploring mental health in public schools. http://apps.npr.org/mental-health/

Every Monday morning at Harvie Elementary School, in Henrico County, Va., Brett Welch stands outside her office door as kids file in. "The first thing I'm looking for are the faces," says Welch, a school counselor. She's searching for hints of fear, pain or anger. "Maybe there was a domestic incident at the house that weekend," says Welch. "That's reality for a lot of our kids." And a reality for a lot of kids in the U.S. While it's difficult to get an exact number, researchers estimate that...

Juvenile justice reform advocates can spread their message further if they carefully guide their audience to an understanding of adolescent development and the justice system, researchers say. The key is to reframe the issue of reform so that the public does not leap to conclusions about a broken system but instead thinks about how it can be improved. “If advocates can make that subtle shift, they’ll build a much bigger constituency,” said Julie Sweetland, vice president for strategy and...

More than 40 million American adults — almost 20 percent of the adult American population — will deal with mental illness this year. Yet mental health (of the citizens, not the candidates) has not been an issue in the presidential campaign. Hillary Clinton tried to change that last week, announcing a plan that offers hope for improving mental health research, diagnosis and treatment. Central to Mrs. Clinton’s plan is the integration of physical and mental health care and reducing the stigma...