A large coalition of violence prevention organizations managed to pass AB 28 last week. It is a historic bill that would create a first-in-the-nation tax on the gun industry to generate $160M annually for gun violence prevention and school safety including school mental health programs. The advocates are mobilizing all possible resources to encourage Governor Newsom to sign the bill. The trauma field knows firsthand the impact of gun violence on Californians. Please help spread the word!

By Elizabeth Cooney, STAT, April 6, 2020 Stark statistics are coming to light only now and only in piecemeal fashion showing that African Americans are disproportionately affected by Covid-19. The racial divide in who gets infected, who gets tested, and who dies from Covid-19 is emerging from the few cities and states whose data are public. African Americans in Illinois, for example, accounted for 29% of confirmed cases and 41% of deaths as of Monday morning, yet they make up only 15% of the...

Wanted to share this timely message from National Alliance on Mental Health (Nami.org) about how one of our most dominant cultural traditions competely disregards the reality of mental health challenges in kids by assigning simplistic labels of "naughty or nice" to them: ".. why is it that, every Christmas, millions of kids get labeled either “nice” or “naughty,” rather than something less reductive? After a few centuries of dishing out coal, that sobering thought occurs to Santa Claus...

Photo Credit: Photo by Marina Shatskih on Unsplash The allegations raised in the recent documentaries about Michael Jackson and singer R. Kelly made headlines this past month, but they were soon buried in a flood of news about the Mueller report and new political scandals. Then, just days ago, we learned of a sting operation in New Jersey that led to the arrest of 16 men, from teachers to police officers and ministers, who were caught attempting to solicit sex from minors. All of these...