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Bessel van der Kolk at his home in Massachusetts. Photo: Frankie Alduino By Danielle Carr, New York Magazine, July 31, 2023 It’s bad news when your university creates a committee to ensure that you don’t publish any research papers without its approval. It’s worse news if the only other person facing similar scrutiny is a man investigating alien abductions. This was the situation facing the trauma researcher Bessel van der Kolk in the mid-’90s when Harvard Medical School informed him that...

By Yesenia Fuentes, Photo: Yaorusheng/Getty Images, Atmos, July 26, 2023 Stephanie Wills has been legally blind since birth. She was born with chorioretinal coloboma, a condition where a person’s retina does not fully develop in utero. The affliction, which Wills has in both eyes, makes sunlight painful. She often keeps her eyes closed and sleeps during the day to capitalize on the night’s sunless hours. In Panama, the tropical Central American country where Wills lives, sunlight is...

With summer winding down, and about 49 million U.S. student s preparing to head back to the classroom, our History. Culture. Trauma. podcast series examines America's challenged school system and its need for trauma-informed supports and solutions. "In recent years, COVID-19, school shootings, affirmation of LGBTQ students, institutional racism, critical race theory, teacher burnout, and parent's rights have transformed America's schools into cultural battlegrounds," said podcast host Ingrid...

Global map of GISTEMP June surface temperature anomaly relative to the 1951-1980 June baseline. Most of the world is “red” due to warm anomalies, with the highest anomalies around Antarctica and Canada. Credit: NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies By NASA Global Climate Change, National Aeronautics and Space Administration, July 13, 2023 June 2023 was the hottest June on record according to NASA’s global temperature analysis . GISTEMP, NASA’s global temperature analysis, is drawn from...

New research publication on a college student mental health literacy mentoring program shows effectiveness

[Editor's note: Dr. Harise Stein at Stanford University edits a web site — abuseresearch.info — that focuses on the effects of abuse, and includes research articles on PACEs. Every month, she posts the summaries of the abstracts and links to research articles that address only ACEs, PCEs and PACEs. Thank you, Harise!! — Rafael Maravilla] Domestic Violence – Effects on Children Moss KM, Loxton D, Mishra GD. Does Timing Matter? Associations Between Intimate Partner Violence Across the Early...

By Christopher Blackwell, Photo: Unsplash, The Progressive Magazine, July 28, 2023 The noise in solitary confinement is ceaseless. You’re startled awake throughout the night by the repetitive slam of heavy steel doors and the shrill jangle of guards’ keys hanging from their belts, by the sound of their walkie-talkies crackling through the vast empty space. Once you’re awake, the light that never sleeps takes over—the long fluorescent bulb mounted above you burns bright. You cover your head...

Former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee visits "The Story with Martha MacCallum" in the Fox News Channel Studios on September 17, 2019 in New York City. Credit: Steven Ferdman/Getty Images By Keerti Gopal, Inside Climate News, July 31, 2023 Beverly Grimmett thought the kids magazines she saw stacked on a coworker’s desk this spring were perfectly innocent, until she picked one up. “My stomach turned,” Grimmett said. The guides were decorated in bright colors and cheerful cartoons, with titles...

Alison Rose Jefferson showing the Phillips Chapel CME church. Photograph: Julien James/The Guardian By Sam Levin, The Guardian, July 30, 2023 A t Shutters on the Beach, a luxury hotel in Santa Monica, guests staying in $1,500-a-night rooms can get pristine views of white-sand shores and the Pacific Ocean, hot stone massages, afternoons filled with live jazz and fresh seafood dinners. Few visitors, however, will know that 100 years ago, the site was at the center of a painful turning point...

Tim Taylor, executive director of the Small School Districts Association. Credit: Jay-ar Ignacio By Cara Nixon, EdSource, July 31, 2023 The Covid-19 pandemic, wildfires, floods — California’s schools have faced it all over the past few years, with rural communities, due to their remote locations, higher rates of poverty and limited access to resources, often facing the brunt of it. Tim Taylor’s role as the executive director of the Small School Districts’ Association has been largely defined...

By Lisa James and Virginia Duplessis, Photo: from article, Futures Without Violence, July 25, 2023 There was a time when emergency department staff routinely treated domestic violence survivors and then sent them right back home to face further abuse, without the ability to offer referrals or other help. When few OB/GYNs knew that pregnant women are at vastly elevated risk of homicide, often at the hands of a current or former partner. When few physicians or nurses talked to young people...

“If we could somehow end child abuse and neglect, the eight hundred pages of DSM (and the need for the easier explanations such as DSM-IV Made Easy: The Clinician's Guide to Diagnosis) would be shrunk to a pamphlet in two generations.” - John Briere My musical thoughts about society's reluctance to address child abuse and neglect in all of its forms.... "Brush Away Your Tears" by Michael Skinner - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jc0GLP91vWE&t=425s Take care, Michael PS This song was used...