Blog

By Lauren M. Johnson , CNN July 18, 2019 Florida will become the third state in the US to require students to learn more about mental health, behind Virginia and New York. The Florida State Board of Education voted on Wednesday to require public schools to provide students in grades six and above a minimum of five hours of mental health education annually. The announcement comes as studies reveal more about how screen time and social media impacts teenagers mentally. According to the...

By Tori Latham, The Atlantic, July 23, 2019. Earlier this year, I set out to make scheduling time with my friends more seamless—or as I, perhaps grandiosely, termed it, “to revolutionize my friend group.” Ten of my friends and I already had a group-text-message thread, which we used as our main form of communication, but even though we talked all day every day, sending one another dumb, meta jokes we saw online about group chats and checking in about who’d be at trivia that night, we still...

By Andrea Hsu, NPR, July 23, 2019. A few years ago, Jason Carney came across a statistic that took him by surprise. In its 2015 survey of jobs in the solar industry , the nonprofit Solar Foundation reported that 0.0% of solar workers in the state of Tennessee were black or African American. That number caught Carney's eye because the Nashville native is African American — and was working there as a solar installer in 2015. In fact, he was starting to design a solar array for his own home in...

By Charlotte West, The Hechinger Report, July 19, 2019. SILVER SPRING, Md. — Towson University student Christelle Etienne isn’t whiling away these long, lazy days of summer lounging by the pool or hanging out with friends from high school. Instead, she’s sitting in a classroom at Montgomery College taking classes in anatomy and physiology. A pre-nursing and foreign language major with a double minor, Etienne is hoping the extra work will keep her on schedule to earn her bachelor’s degree.

By Tina Rosenberg, The New York Times, July 22, 2019. What disease in the world today disables the most people? By many measures , it’s depression — and that holds nearly everywhere, whether you live in Zimbabwe or the United States. In poor countries, virtually no one gets treatment. But even rich countries run short. A survey in 2013 and 2014 found that about half a million residents of New York City had depression and that fewer than 40 percent of them got treatment . The city is taking...

By Carly Stern, Ozy, July 22, 2019. First-year medical student Anna Goshua was interviewing an emergency room physician in March to learn more about the job when she heard about a patient who had come all the way from Puerto Rico to that ER in Massachusetts for health care. Hurricane Maria had wiped out all prospects of the patient seeking care at home. A surprised Goshua pored over her Stanford University curriculum to learn more about climate migrants. She realized the school offered no...

YWFC sponsored Sister Warriors meeting When she was 15 years old, Lucero Herrera was put in a rehab program by San Francisco’s Juvenile Court because she was getting drunk regularly. And in doing so, the court failed to explore the root of her drinking. Had they done so, she said, they would have found that anger and trauma were lurking underneath, driven by her ACEs: adverse childhood experiences. Lucero Herrera "Why did they put me in a drug program when I had an anger problem? I went...

Below is an updated table of bills that address childhood adversity in the Legislature in 2019. The list is not exhaustive, so please email Kelly Hardy with Children Now if you think a bill is missing and/or if you have any questions. Email: khardy @childrennow.org . Here are key dates for the remainder of the legislative session: July 10 = last day for bills to pass out of policy committees July 12 – August 12 = Summer recess August 30 = last day for fiscal bills to pass out of committee...

By Juli Fraga, MindShift Podcast, KQED News, July 15, 2019 Studies about the Ten Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs) have shown that most people have experienced one of these traumas in childhood, such as being abused, having a parent who is incarcerated, experiencing homelessness, among others. The trauma one experiences in childhood can affect adult mental and physical health in later years, especially if a person has multiple ACEs. While the harm can have lasting impacts, health...

By Bruce Levine, Counter Punch, July 19, 2019. What variable is associated with a 12 times greater likelihood of a suicide attempt—and also doubles the likelihood of cancer, heart disease, or stroke? In the late 1990s, the Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACE) Study revealed a stunningly powerful relationship between childhood trauma and later adult emotional difficulties and physical health problems. Two decades after the ACE Study was published, it has finally become politically correct for...

By Noam Levy, Los Angeles Times, July 17, 2019. WASHINGTON — Denise Wall, a Fresno-area schoolteacher with more than $2,000 in medical bills, was outraged to hear she could get free care if she quit her job and enrolled her family in Medicaid. Brenda Bartlett, a factory worker in Nebraska, was so angry about $2,500 in medical bills she ran up using the coverage she got at work that she dropped insurance altogether. “They don’t give a rat’s butt about people like me,” she said. Sue Andersen,...

On July 11, the House Committee on Oversight and Reform held its first-ever hearing on childhood trauma, featuring emotional testimony from survivor witnesses, as well as a number of prominent public health experts and government officials. The hearing took place just a little over a month after the announcement of the Rise from Trauma Act , bipartisan, bicameral legislation that would fund increased services and supports for trauma-impacted children and families. (See previous MIA Report: “...