Blog

Luvenia Jackson knows students can’t learn when they’re in jail. During 40 years in education, the Clayton County Public Schools superintendent has seen that academic performance cannot improve systemwide under zero-tolerance discipline . Instead of leading to safer buildings and higher achievement, the strict policies cause excessive suspensions, lost instruction time, and students to be needlessly traumatized by criminal charges—all over behavior that can be...

B ritish Prime Minister David Cameron thinks parents need government-approved advice on raising kids. British parents aren't exactly thrilled with this recent proclamation. One of Cameron's new policy prescriptions, unveiled Monday with an announcement that England will pour £70 million over the next five years into “relationship support,” was state-backed parenting classes. Vouchers, he said, would help cover the enrollment of low-income families. Behind...

Argosy began in 1882 as a magazine for children and ceased publication ninety-six years later as soft-core porn for men, but for ten years in between it was the home of a true-crime column by Erle Stanley Gardner, the man who gave the world Perry Mason. In eighty-two novels, six films, and nearly three hundred television episodes, Mason, a criminal-defense lawyer, took on seemingly guilty clients and proved their innocence. In the magazine, Gardner, who had practiced law before turning to...

The Hogg Foundation for Mental Health is pleased to announce a call for applications  (CFA) for the evaluation of a new Community Reentry Pilot Project focusing on the role of peer support in improving outcomes for justice-involved individuals with mental health issues. Financial support for this evaluation project may range between $20,000 and $30,000 over a 12-to-18 month period. The Hogg Foundation has a long-standing interest in identifying the potential benefits and challenges of...

As she does most workdays, Christine Gray spent her time on a recent rainy, cold day driving to people’s homes in Williamson County to offer help with mental and physical health crises. The first door she knocked on during a three-hour span spent with a reporter was at a house where a man called 911 to say burglars were constantly breaking into his home and that he had even cooked waffles for them. The second call was a teenager withdrawing from taking 20 Xanax pills. The third call...

The Texas Legislature meets every other year. For 140 calendar days. The state’s legislative agenda is so densely packed that keeping track of any policy area, mental health included, is a dizzying task. This summary tells you what you need to know about bills that were passed, commissions that were formed, and reforms that were pushed. Funding for Veterans Caring for our nation’s veterans is one issue that the entire legislature can support. This legislative session was no...

Despite recent improvements to their training, a new study in the journal of Police and Criminal Psychologysuggests the police are as susceptible as the general public to holding false beliefs about psychology that apply to their work. The research, conducted in the UK, also showed that police officers have more confidence than the public in their false beliefs. Chloe Chaplin, a programme facilitator at the London Probation Trust, and Julia Shaw, senior lecturer at South Bank university,...

By Emma Brown January 17  Her eighth-grade classmate kept asking her to have sex in the bathroom. Tired of the badgering, she asked a teacher’s aide for help, and the aide outlined a plan: Lure the boy. Meet him in the bathroom. Catch him in the act. The 14-year-old girl agreed, but the impromptu sting operation went horribly wrong. Inside a bathroom stall at their Alabama middle school, the boy forced himself on her before anyone showed up to stop him. When nurses treated her,...

   Mobilizing Action for Resilient Communities (MARC) is a learning collaborative of 14 communities committed to building resilience and addressing childhood trauma through an explicit application of the Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs) science, language, and data. MARC is coordinated by the Health Federation of Philadelphia with support from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and The California Endowment. You can read more about MARC  here.   They were curious,...

The Impact of ACEs Healthcare Here is where I need to use the word REVOLUTION. I believe the greatest possible impact for using the ACE Study to improve the lives of our entire world today lies in the Pediatric segment. There have been some breakthroughs in this arena…but to my way of thinking…not quick enough. And no, it’s not the ACE score of the children I am referencing, but the use of the ACE questionnaire with the parents…ALL parents! The only way to change...

Scientists at the Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis analyzed the brain scans of 105 children ages 7 to 12 and found that key structures in the brain are connected differently in poor children than in kids raised in more affluent settings. In particular, the brain's hippocampus, associated with learning, memory, and the regulation of stress, and the amygdala, which is linked to stress and emotion, connect to other areas of the brain differently in poor children than in...

A landmark study of the lasting and destructive effects of childhood trauma provides guidance with the potential to significantly improve the well-being of untold millions of people who have been, or will be, abused, neglected or similarly harmed. And the financial savings could be dramatic. "The implications are revolutionary," says David S. Lauterbach, a trauma expert who is president and CEO of the Kent Center, in Warwick. "When you think about the long-term permutations, it boggles the...