Blog

Warning: Season 6 spoilers abound. It was the most shocking scene in an episode that otherwise played out precisely as expected . Walda Frey, the wife of Roose Bolton, gave birth to a son. (This was not the surprising part: The existence of another Bolton heir had been heavily hinted at last season.) The birth of a healthy baby—a boy, no less—was good news to everyone save for Ramsay Bolton, who “would prefer to be an only child.” So Ramsay, having murdered his father to ensure his accession...

As a highly-sensitive person (as defined by Elaine Aron in her bestseller The Highly Sensitive Person ), I’m easily overwhelmed, or over-aroused ( not in a sexual way — not on antidepressants). I have been compiling ways to calm down over the years. I learned some in Aron’s book, some as part of the mindfulness-based stress reduction (MBSR) program I participated in, and just recently picked up a slew of them in Lauren Brukner’s fantastic book, The Kids’ Guide to Staying Awesome and in...

On April 27, "Healing Orange County from Childhood Trauma" held its first meeting in Mission Viejo, CA at a local restaurant from 6 to 8 pm. We posted it on meetup.com as the founding meeting of Orange County (CA) ACEs Connection. I was honored to co-create the meeting with my dear friend Dana Brown, Southern California director for ACEs Connection. We felt awe as three education activists, six professional trauma therapy providers, individuals suffering child trauma and a total of 12 people...

A somber procession began on Sunday in the courtyard of the former Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tenn., where Martin Luther King Jr. was killed in 1968. Everyone in Memphis knows about that piece of history, but until recently, folks were unaware of a massacre that happened in the same part of town 100 years earlier. On May 1, 1866, Memphis was home to a massacre that left dozens of black folks dead and countless others injured. This week in Memphis, the city is remembering that grim chapter in...

Last week, NPR published a special report on suicide in Native Arctic communities. Reporter Rebecca Hersher spent 10 weeks in Greenland, the Arctic country with the highest known suicide rate in the world: 82.8 suicides per 100,000 people each year — six times higher than the U.S. suicide rate. She interviewed Inuit people in the Greenlandic capital, Nuuk, and in small towns on the country's remote east coast. She spoke with community leaders and mental health professionals who are trying to...

Jaime Rangel holds a bike tire and begins checking with his hands for thorns and other sharp objects that might be puncturing the tire's rubber tread. His fingers, stained with black patches of oil, move quickly and seamlessly. He's done this type of work dozens of times before. All around him, a steady stream of kids line up to get their bikes' flat tires and faulty brakes fixed at this free event at a park in southeast Fresno, Calif. The free bike repairs are a preamble to the Cumbia Ride,...

Excerpts from Elephant Journal piece. "How come when I googled “PTSD” a few weeks back, this is what I got? Where are the women? The children? The civilian men with PTSD? The missing images are striking—and troubling, considering the facts: “Women are more than twice as likely to develop PTSD than men (10% for women and 4% for men).” ~ Department of Veteran’s Affairs Twice as likely —but looking at the search images, one might think women don’t get post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) at...

Beating, yelling and neglect can all be passed from one generation to the next — but parents are often keen to break the cycle of abuse if they can get the right help, researchers said Monday. They found that the more adverse childhood experiences a person had, the more likely their children were to be troubled, too. The findings suggest that poor parenting is handed on from one generation to the next, said Anne-Marie Conn, a researcher at the University of Rochester Medical Center. Spanking...

Federal officials have moved to ban the controversial electric shock device a Boston-area group home and school has used for decades on its disabled clients. In a 124-page document proposing the ban, the Food and Drug Administration accused The Judge Rotenberg Center of underreporting adverse effects from the device, using flawed studies to defend its approach, and misleading families about alternative treatments. “FDA has determined that these devices present an unreasonable and substantial...

Berkeley, California, is a small city facing some large-scale challenges. There are the environmental: the Hayward fault line runs straight through the city, and the California drought and the impending effects of sea level rise on the San Francisco Bay pose threats of fires and floods. And there are the social: despite its progressive history, socioeconomic and racial inequity persist in Berkeley, and have only been exacerbated by the regional tech boom. These are not isolated challenges,...

Two years ago, the president of Credit Management Services, a collection agency in Grand Island, Nebraska, presented a struggling local family with the keys to a used 2007 Mercury Grand Marquis. To commemorate the donation, the company held a ceremony that concluded outside its offices, where the couple and their two young girls could try out their new car. The family’s story was dire: Their 8-year-old daughter’s failing kidney had led to multiple surgeries and a deluge of medical bills,...

More than 70 million Americans have some kind of criminal record. For them, and the 600,000 Americans released from state and federal prisons each year, having served time can often mean that the cornerstones of the reintegration process—securing a job and housing—become exceedingly difficult tasks. Last week, President Obama signed a memorandum proposing a rule that would prohibit federal agencies from asking whether applicants for government jobs have a criminal record until the final...