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The Trump administration is stepping up aid for infants and mothers caught in the opioid epidemic, promising to help states cope with some of the worst collateral damage of the drug crisis, Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar said Tuesday. Azar said HHS would partner with states to offer a range of services to mothers with substance-use disorders and the skyrocketing number of newborns dependent on drugs. Those infants, who suffer from a condition known as neonatal abstinence...

Hi! I'm Nadya , and I'm the Founder and Executive Director of PERIOD . My debut book, PERIOD POWER: A MANIFESTO FOR THE MENSTRUAL MOVEMENT , is out today! I hope that this book will act as the cape, crown, and manifesto anyone needs to embrace joining this Menstrual Movement. Get Your Copy of PERIOD POWER It’s almost 2019, and yet, 36 US states still have a sales tax on period products because they are considered luxury items (unlike Rogaine and Viagra), period-related pain is a leading...

[Note: This is most of a keynote presentation I gave at last week's sold-out National ACEs Conference in San Francisco. The energy at this conference was incredible. To all who attended, thank you for doing so. To those of you who weren't able to attend, we hope the posts about the conference give you some idea of the speakers and sessions.] We have come an extraordinarily long way in spreading the word about ACEs science. During the first National ACEs conference in Philadelphia five years...

Liz Huntley framed by a photo of her as a 5-year-old Liz Huntley is a passionate children’s advocate who believes that all children should have access to preschool. It could make a life-changing difference in a child’s life. It did for Huntley. The attorney and author described her childhood to a rapt audience of more than 800 gathered on Oct. 16 for the two-day 2018 National ACEs Conference in San Francisco. She was one of four speakers at a plenary session that touched on foundational...

When Blue Hess was with his biological family, both his parents and their extended family abused and neglected him and his siblings. They had drug abuse problems, and problems with alcohol. According to Blue, his dad would beat and punch him all the time. In the documentary film License to Parent , Blue tells the story of how he was at his father’s house in his room and was hungry. “I was so hungry and I know my dad was in the house but I couldn’t get the food because I’d get in trouble. So...

How high economic inequality negatively impacts nearly every aspect of human well-being—as well as the health of the biosphere. [For more on this collection of stories, go to https://www.scientificamerican.com/report/the-science-of-inequality1/ ]

PANAMA CITY, Fla. (AP) — Amy Cross has a hard time explaining the stress of living in a city that was splintered by Hurricane Michael . She's fearful after hearing gunshots at night, and she's confused because she no longer recognizes the place where she's spent her entire 45 years. "I just know I don't feel real, and home doesn't feel like home at all," Cross said. Health workers say they are seeing signs of mental problems in residents more than a week after Michael, and the issues could...

When I recently moved my youngest son into college and felt unexpected grief at my “empty nest,” I turned to my friends for help. These are women I’ve known more than 40 years, who know me better than anyone else and gave me exactly what I needed: a sympathetic ear, lots of hugs, time in nature, a dose of laughter, and the warm feeling of being loved and understood. Despite how much we rely on friends, there is little science about the power of friendship. In part, that may be because...

In April of 2016, the New York Times declared that then-presidential candidate Donald Trump had set himself apart from the rest of the Republican Party in one unusual manner: his embrace, relative to his colleagues, of LGBT rights. Americans "[should] use the bathroom they feel is appropriate," Trump famously said amid the outcry over a North Carolina bathroom law that prohibited citizens from using a public restroom that didn't match their gender identity at birth. Months later, following...

The global “war on drugs” is a “spectacular” failure that has led to thousands of murders, public health crises and human rights abuses, a new report showed. Released on Monday, the report from the International Drug Policy Consortium (IDPC), a global coalition of 170 nongovernmental organizations working on drug policy issues, overviewed the failure of the 10-year global strategy from the United Nations, which intended to eradicate the illicit drug market by next year. Instead of curbing...

Community builds resilience, and resilience builds community. And it often comes in the strangest, or perhaps the most mundane of places, according to Mark Nepo. Nepo, 67, is a poet, philosopher, teacher and cancer survivor. He said his very first experience with discovering an authentic community happened 30 years ago when he almost died from a rare form of lymphoma. [For more on this story by Heather McElhatton, go to...

Chirlane McCray is passionate about mental health. The first lady of New York City openly discusses how mental illness has affected her own family, including diseases like bipolar disorder and schizophrenia, PTSD and a relative who died by suicide. She brought that passion to her Oct. 19 lunchtime keynote at AHCJ’s Urban Health Journalism Workshop . McCray founded ThriveNYC , a broad-based mental health initiative designed to reach deep into communities throughout the five boroughs and...