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By Daniel J. Levitin, Thrive Global, January 28, 2020 Stress is also an emotion, one that we share with other animals and with one another across the life span, although the causes of stress can be quite variable. Chronic stress is especially harmful. Stress is also highly variable—what would stress out one person another takes in stride, and vice versa. Stress can have a substantial impact on longevity. Consider an experiment with Pacific salmon. After swimming upstream to spawn, and...

By Bridget M. Kuehn, JAMA Network, January 29, 2020 For many sexual assault survivors whom Anita Ravi, MD, MPH, sees as a New York City–based family physician, the prospect of even basic medical care can be frightening. Some have put off Papanicolaou tests and mammograms for years or even decades. To help them, Ravi has adopted a trauma-informed approach that works to restore patients’ trust and give them a greater sense of control over their visit. This may include asking permission before...

By Rachel A. Davis and Howard Pinderhughes, California Health Report, December 19, 2019 Earlier this month, California’s Surgeon General Nadine Burke Harris launched an ambitious campaign to reduce adverse childhood experiences, which can cause lifelong health problems. With more than 60 percent of Californians saying they were exposed to a traumatic childhood event, adverse childhood experiences are at crisis levels in the state. The ACEs Aware campaign will train and pay health care...

By Eric Rosand, B. Heidi Ellis, and Stevan Weine, The Brookings Institute, January 28, 2020 Senior officials from governments fighting ISIS are meeting this week, and they would do well to consider how better to repatriate children of ISIS fighters. Disagreements over whether or not countries should be doing more to try to repatriate their citizens, particularly the children, remain. Yet rather than focusing on those seemingly intractable differences, members of the global coalition to...

By John Kelly, The Chronicle of Social Change, January 26, 2020. A new federal report has found nothing new: time in foster care is associated with negative circumstances later in life. The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) just published findings from a fairly novel approach to assessing the impact of foster care experience as people move from young adulthood into middle age-dom. A group of researchers within HHS used six years of responses to the National Survey of Family...

By John Kelly, The Chronicle of Social Change. Tavon Rolbiecki was born exposed to multiple drugs and alcohol. While relatives stepped up to take him home, he ended up in Chisago County foster care. Latonia Rolbiecki became a licensed foster parent, favored by an independent expert as the right person to raise Tavon. That didn’t persuade Chisago County. An eight-day hearing would determine if Chisago County unjustly kept Latonia Rolbiecki from her grandson – and if it was too late to make...

By Brentin Mock, City Lab, January 28, 2020. On November 18, two women walked in through the unlocked door of a vacant three-bedroom house on West Oakland’s Magnolia Street, set up small bedrooms for themselves and their children, and settled in for an occupation designed to call attention to the Bay Area’s housing affordability crisis. Over the next few months, this collective of formerly unhoused women grew in size—and power. Calling themselves Moms 4 Housing , the group remained in 2928...

A word of encouragement from Pete Walker about the ongoing struggle in dealing with Flashbacks, and how setting your expectation can make a world of difference in your healing journey.

In a new policy brief from the UC Davis Center for Poverty Research, Zach Newman and Lisa R. Pruitt write that California's legal-aid system should be funded with sensitivity to rural needs in order to deliver adequate legal aid to all Californians, wherever they reside. Key Facts: Rural homelessness in California is rising, sometimes more quickly than its urban equivalent. High rural eviction rates are caused in part by inadequate access to legal assistance in rural communities. New laws...

SAN FRANCISCO , Jan. 28, 2020 /PRNewswire/ The Center for Youth Wellness announces the release of an in-depth study on the health-related cost of adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) in the state of California . A number of studies have investigated the cost of child maltreatment, but the current study, entitled " Adult health burden and costs in California during 2013 associated with prior adverse childhood experiences ," is the first to examine the cost associated with adult health...

By Marlon Peterson, The Marshall Project, January 23, 2020. I celebrated the 10th anniversary of my release from a New York prison in Accra, the capital city of Ghana. I was there to participate in The Year of Return , a countrywide commemoration of the 400 years since the first Africans were trafficked to the British colony now known as Virginia. Yes, I went to Afrochella . But on December 23—10 years to the day that I left prison—I was compelled to visit the Cape Coast Castle, a trading...

By Rhitu Chatterjee, NPR, January 28, 2020. Shortly after she gave birth to her son last May, Meghan Reddick, 36, began to struggle with depression. "The second I had a chance where I wasn't holding [my son], I would go to my room and cry," says Reddick, who lives with her son and husband. "And I probably couldn't count how many hours a day I cried." Reddick is among the many women who suffer from depression during pregnancy and after childbirth . "There's this kind of myth that women...