Blog

By Tom Hays, The Washington Post, October 24, 2019 A law enforcement think tank wants police departments dealing with a suicide crisis in their ranks to rethink how they make one of their toughest decisions: when to take guns away from troubled officers. The recommendation to review gun-removal policies is contained in a new report by the Washington-based Police Executive Research Forum released in anticipation of a gathering of police chiefs this weekend in Chicago. It aims to help law...

By The Associated Press, The New York Times, October 24, 2019 U.S. immigration authorities separated more than 1,500 children from their parents at the Mexico border early in the Trump administration, the American Civil Liberties Union said Thursday, bringing the total number of children separated since July 2017 to more than 5,400. The ACLU said the administration told its attorneys that 1,556 children were separated from July 1, 2017, to June 26, 2018, when a federal judge in San Diego...

By Seth Klamann, Casper Star-Tribune, October 25, 2019 The suicide rate among older teenagers in Wyoming has increased by 40% over the past three years, according to a sweeping health report released last month that placed the Equality State in the lower half of states for women’s and children’s health. Among adolescents between the ages of 15 and 19, the suicide rate jumped from 22.2 deaths per 100,000 residents in 2016 to 31.1 this year. It’s the second-worst rate in America, behind...

By American Academy of Pediatrics, Science Daily, October 25, 2019 Studies show that children exposed to childhood trauma known as adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) are at increased risk of being bullied or bullying others. New research being presented at the American American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) 2019 National Conference & Exhibition suggests that family resilience -- the ability to work together to overcome problems, for example -- reduces this risk. The research abstract,...

By Michelle Andrews, Kaiser Health News, October 24, 2019 When Ben Packard met with the 16-year-old girl a little over a year ago, she was a patient at Seattle Children’s Hospital, where she’d been admitted after trying to kill herself. Her parents were distraught. “They wanted to know what was going on, and why their kid wanted to die,” said Packard, a mental health therapist on the psychiatric unit who worked with her and her family. But Washington is one of many states that carved out...

By Rebecca Bellan, City Lab, October 22, 2019 In February, Assia, 21, of Queens, was caught trying to steal a shirt from a store on Canal Street in Manhattan—a would-be birthday present for her best friend. By the time she realized she’d been made and tried to put the shirt back, the police had already arrived. She says they cuffed her and slammed her against a wall when she slipped one thin wrist out of the cuff. The encounter was frightening but when Assia was released from booking, the...

By Ziad Obermeyer, Brian Powers, Christine Vogeli, and Sendhil Mullainathan, Science, October 25, 2019 Racial bias in health algorithms The U.S. health care system uses commercial algorithms to guide health decisions. Obermeyer et al. find evidence of racial bias in one widely used algorithm, such that Black patients assigned the same level of risk by the algorithm are sicker than White patients (see the Perspective by Benjamin). The authors estimated that this racial bias reduces the number...

By Thomas Fuller and Kendra Pierre-Louis, The New York Times, October 24, 2019 Facing down 600 wildfires in the past three days alone, emergency workers rushed to evacuate tens of thousands of people in Southern California on Thursday as a state utility said one of its major transmission lines broke near the source of the out-of-control Kincade blaze in Northern California. The Kincade fire, the largest this week, tore through steep canyons in the wine country of northern Sonoma County,...

By The Associated Press, The New York Times, October 24, 2019 The number of children in the U.S. foster care system has dropped for the first time since 2012, stemming a surge that was linked to substance abuse by parents, according to new federal data released on Thursday. The annual report from the Department of Health and Human Services counted 437,283 children in foster care as of Sept. 30, 2018, down from about 441,000 a year earlier. The peak was 524,000 children in foster care in...

The full moon was setting and the sun was rising as organizers from KIDS Network, Children & Family Resource Services, Casa Pacifica, and the Department of Behavioral Wellness began setting up the 2019 BRIDGES TO RESILIENCE Conference on October 14 th at the beautiful Hilton Santa Barbara Beachfront Resort. The stately halls and ballrooms were a flurry of activity as staff prepared to receive over 350 community members who work with children, youth and families in Santa Barbara County.

One of the lessons learned from the Woodhull Study Revisited is that when a health reporter contacts a nurse, we need to be ready to respond in a timely manner. Just 10 days ago, I received this inquiry through the Relentless School Nurse Facebook page: I thank Barbara Glickstein for her expert guidance in nursing media competencies because I felt prepared to speak with Cathy and things certainly did move quickly! I was honored to contribute to this article along with Linda Mendonca, MSN,...

By Alexandra Chen, Catherine Panter-Brick, et al., Society for Research in Child Development, October 24, 2019 Abstract The impacts of war and displacement on executive function (EF)—what we might call the cognitive signatures of minds under siege—are little known. We surveyed a gender‐balanced sample of 12‐ to 18‐year‐old Syrian refugees (n = 240) and Jordanian non‐refugees (n = 210) living in Jordan. We examined the relative contributions of poverty, trauma exposure, posttraumatic stress,...