The United Nations top investigator on torture has delivered a scathing criticism of juvenile justice practices common in the United States, including routine detention of youths, solitary confinement and sentences of life without parole for...
An Ojibwe woman and independent journalist Mary Annette Pember recently visited Alaska for a series of stories on historical trauma and Native American mental health practices. Pember says the troubled lives of Native Americans reflect their...
My people don’t do psychotherapy. We have friends. We have families. We have pharmacies. Paying strangers to listen to our problems isn’t our style. I’m Persian, made in Iran pre-revolution, born in America mid-revolution,...
The box was the first thing I noticed when I stepped into Hermie Lagpao’s cramped bedroom in her apartment outside Paris. It sat in the center of a room that was cozy by default, because of its size, and made homey by years’ worth...
The bystander effect, which was first identified in the late 1960s, describes a fascinating quirk of human behavior: Our level of altruistic behavior depends, in large part, to the circumstances we find ourselves in. As studies has shown,...
Heart disease is the number one killer of both men and women in the United States, yet it’s long been considered a “man’s disease” in the popular imagination. This perception likely stems, in part, from the fact that...
For every dollar spent on treating depression, almost five dollars is spent on the treatment and workplace costs of related medical conditions like back and chest pain, sleep disorders and migraines – placing a greater financial burden on...
America's prison state is a disaster. One percent of the adult population is behind bars, and corrections is squeezing higher education out of state budgets. We have five times as many people in prison as we ever had before 1980, and five times...
A 17-year-old youth removed a pair of audio headphones and smiled as he stepped out of a San Francisco sound booth on a Wednesday afternoon. He had just recorded his first hip-hop song. “Man, it’s warm in there!” he declared,...
Jerome Pate, a homeless alcoholic, went to the emergency room when he was cold. He went when he needed a safe place to sleep. He went when he was hungry, or drunk, or suicidal. “I’d go sometimes just to have a place to be,” he...
Let me ask you a question. How would you react if you discovered a trusted relative was sexually abusing a child in your family? Or maybe the abuser is a highly respected, influential person in an organization you support. Would you...
Doctors are much more likely to level with patients who have cancer than patients who have Alzheimer's, according to a report released this week by the Alzheimer's Association. The report found that just 45 percent of Medicare patients who'd...
More than 5 million Americans have dementia, and that number is only climbing. Each case leaves some people wondering what's left in a friendship when the bond between confidants becomes literally unthinkable, when language and thinking fail....
Young composers and people with experience of mental illness are using the genre of classical song to de-stigmatise the issue. The unique collaboration, which includes compelling descriptions of being sectioned and frank accounts of life with...
A fatal shooting last year by police in Albuquerque, New Mexico, of a homeless man with a history of schizophrenia triggered large demonstrations. A month later, Milwaukee police shot a mentally ill man 14 times. In Dallas, a person with mental...