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Wednesday, October 31, 2018 When a pregnant mother has a drug or alcohol problem, or there is spousal abuse taking place, the effect that has on a child can be devastating. While making our documentary film License to Parent , we interviewed Cathy Friend and her husband who have fostered 32 newborns over the years from mothers on drugs, alcohol, or in abusive relationships. As Cathy says, “The damage starts in utero, and there's scientific proof of that. You and I, as parents, did damage to...

On a late-October morning two years ago, Robin Steinberg stood barefoot in her apartment, on the Upper West Side, preparing to uproot her life. Her suitcases were stacked by the door, her winter coats piled in the hallway. Steinberg, a fifty-nine-year-old native New Yorker, had decided to move to Tulsa, Oklahoma, to launch a legal startup. She laced up her sneakers and said goodbye to the bedrooms of her grown children, which she called “the shrines.” As she dragged her bags to her car, she...

A new study published by University of Alabama at Birmingham researchers shows that community health workers and peer support can help those suffering from depression and diabetes. Many studies have shown that people with diabetes have a greater risk of depression. The stress of daily diabetes management can build. Diabetes complications such as nerve damage or difficulty managing blood sugar levels can at times make those suffering feel overwhelmed and trapped. Published in Diabetes Care ,...

n the United States, poverty, incarceration, and race are linked in complex ways, with much evidence that poverty may be both a cause and a consequence of incarceration. Black men are disproportionately more likely than white men to be arrested and incarcerated, a racial gap that first emerged in the early 20th century. In a new study, I explore the historical role played in that gap by education. I find that black men fully exposed to an expansion of rural primary schools between 1913 and...

Blood pressure and heart rate are not fixed, but rather they adapt to meet physical and social demands placed on the body, according to new research from Binghamton University, State University at New York. Researchers at Binghamton University recorded the blood pressure and heart rate of women in sedentary positions (e.g. secretaries, technicians) over a three-month time frame—from the moment these women woke up until they went to sleep. "The reason why their job matters (sedentary type...

A century ago, the scientist Karl Pearson was studying cemetery headstones when he noticed something peculiar: Husbands and wives often died within a year of one another. Though not widely appreciated at the time, studies now show that stress and despair can significantly influence health, especially that of the heart. One of the most striking examples is a condition known as Takotsubo cardiomyopathy, or broken-heart syndrome, in which the death of a spouse, financial worries or some other...

A new Johns Hopkins study of more than 75,000 teenagers and children who suffered a firearm-related injury between 2006 and 2014 pinpoints the financial burden of gunshot wounds and highlights the increasing incidence of injury in certain age groups. A report of the analysis will be published in JAMA Pediatrics on Oct. 29, 2018. In light of recent school shootings such as the February 2018 mass shooting at the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Florida, which killed 17 students and...

Anti-Semitism is on the rise. On Saturday, 11 Jews were killed in a Pittsburgh synagogue, allegedly by a man who has been charged with federal hate crimes, a man with a documented history of posting anti-Semitic rants and conspiracy theories on far-right social networking website Gab . While law enforcement has not confirmed the motive for this shooting, the assailant had concentrated his energy on one particular set of conspiracy theories. According to reports of his Gab account, he echoed...

Many of my seventh-grade students do not arrive at school ready to learn. Their families often face financial hardship and live in cramped quarters, which makes it difficult to focus on homework. The responsibility for cooking and taking care of younger siblings while parents work often falls on these twelve year olds’ small shoulders. Domestic violence and abuse are also not uncommon. To help traumatized students overcome their personal and academic challenges, one of our first jobs as...

After three days of inspiring presentations, panel discussions and breakout sessions at the National ACEs Conference, the crowd of 850 people was eager to hear from two of the ACEs movement’s pioneers: Dr. Vincent Felitti and Dr. Nadine Burke-Harris. During a luncheon plenary on the last day of the conference, which was held Oct. 15-17 in San Francisco, Felitti related a story about what happened when he first broached the subject with colleagues of asking patients to fill out a...

One plump, juicy, dusty purple Concord grape. That’s all it took for a sudden, overwhelming mix of rage, loss, sadness, and panicky fear to flood over me, leaving me sitting in my kitchen, shaking, heart pounding, with tears streaming down my face. Then, blind-sided, I wondered, What the hell just happened? The short answer: That one tiny grape was a trauma trigger, though I’d had no idea before popping it into my mouth that it would be. It turns out that the smell (and taste) of that one...

We believe in the power of storytelling and the importance of investing in the future by sharing those stories – whether they are stories of successful community ventures or lessons learned from stories of things you wish happened just a little bit differently. These are the stories of communities working together for the common good. – Community Commons Appalachian Regional Commission | A year ago, a report released by the Appalachian Regional Commission, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation...