Blog

Great column by Maia Szalavitz who is the author of “Unbroken Brain: A Revolutionary New Way of Understanding Addiction.” There are, speaking broadly, two schools of thought on addiction: The first was that my brain had been chemically “hijacked” by drugs, leaving me no control over a chronic, progressive disease. The second was simply that I was a selfish criminal, with little regard for others, as much of the public still seems to believe. (When it’s our own loved ones who become addicted,...

On June 23, the U.S. Department of Justice sealed a deal with the Hinds County Detention Center and sheriff’s office in Mississippi to making sweeping changes to the county’s jail system. The new reforms focus on how to identify and treat mentally ill inmates and on reducing the time people can be detained at the jail. While this is happening in a small county in the Deep South, what makes these reforms monumental is that they seem to be signaling the dawn of a post-solitary-confinement era.

There's a hot pink suitcase on the floor of Shariah Vroman-Nagy's bedroom. The 18-year-old is packing for a trip to Disneyland, one of several she takes with her family every year. "Let's see, I need a hairbrush," she says, moving past the collection of Mickey Mouse ears on her dresser and glancing at the inspirational quotes from Marilyn Monroe on the wall. The lyrics to a song called " Smile " hang in a frame over her bed. "My mom made me that when I was struggling," says Vroman-Nagy,...

Minnesota took the top spot in a national annual ranking that scores the well-being of U.S. children. But the state’s children of color don’t fare as well. In the 2016 Kids Count ranking released Tuesday by the Annie E. Casey Foundation, Minnesota was No. 1 in the overall child well-being ranking that’s based on 16 indicators. The indicators cover economic well-being, education, health, and family and community. It was the second consecutive year the state ranked first overall and the...

Kierkegaard called anxiety “the dizziness of freedom” and believed that it serves to power rather than hinder creativity . For Darwin, it was a paralyzing lifelong struggle — he accomplished his breakthroughs not because of anxiety but despite it. “Anxiety,”Anaïs Nin wrote in her diary ,“makes others feel as you might when a drowning man holds on to you.” Anxiety belongs to the broader complex relationship between creativity and mental illness , and although the causal direction of that...

As constant travelers and parents of a 2-year-old, we sometimes fantasize about how much work we can do when one of us gets on a plane, undistracted by phones, friends, and Finding Nemo. We race to get all our ground work done: packing, going through TSA, doing a last-minute work call, calling each other, then boarding the plane. Then, when we try to have that amazing work session in flight, we get nothing done. Even worse, after refreshing our email or reading the same studies over and...

As I begin to share with faith communities throughout Montana why adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) matter and how they can help build more resilient children and healthier communities, I sometimes hear something like this: "But why does it matter? What difference should it make in ministry?” The ACE survey measured the prevalence of 10 stress-inducing factors in childhood including abuse, neglect and substance abuse in the home, and these factors definitely influence ministries...

Almost every day, a patient comes into Dr. Arthur Sorrell’s San Francisco emergency room still wearing a wristband from another hospital nearby. “There are folks who have a life of going from emergency department to emergency department, and that’s how their day is spent,” said Sorrell, an emergency physician and administrator at Sutter Health. “It’s sad and tragic, but that’s what happens.” The wristband is at least a hint. Without it, emergency room staff often have no idea they are...

I just finished my third screening of Jamie Redford's documentary film, Paper Tigers . This third time around was special, as I was watching from Whitman College in Walla Walla, WA, home of Lincoln High School, which is featured in the film. After spending the day on a tour of the community, learning about the various trauma-informed services expanding throughout Walla Walla and surrounding communities in SE Washington, watching the film in it's home town was the perfect end to an inspiring...

As I mentioned in last week’s roundup, we’ll start to populate the new Resource Center next month. One of the sections lists all the ACE surveys. We’ll include those with the original 10 questions as well as those surveys that ask some, but not all of the ACE questions. We will also include ACE surveys that have additional questions. But we will also put those expanded surveys in a separate list, as we explained last week. Here goes: There’s the grandaddy of them all — the original...

Understanding who we are and the prospects for our future are two areas I think a lot about. When I was growing up in a traumatizing home, I often spent hours daydreaming about how life was going to be once I left home. I read catalogs about boats and fishing gear, mountain climbing and learning how to fly. I lived in this future where things were going to be so much better. I thought about going to college and eating unlimited amounts of food in a cafeteria. I was always dreaming of a...

It’s hard to believe that we were ever so innocent, but for a brief moment in the third quarter of last year, Jim Webb was a candidate for the 2016 Democratic presidential nomination. Webb is a decorated veteran, a former Secretary of the Navy, a best-selling author, and a one-term Virginia senator — a model nominee in many ways. But he’s also self-identified redneck , and there just aren’t many of those in the current Democratic national leadership. Fittingly, Webb’s campaign, which lasted...