February 2016

Some musicians score a record deal and immediately buy a luxurious home, a fancy ride, or some other status-symbol indicator. When the New Orleans-based rapper Dee-1 signed with RCA in 2013, he decided to pay off his student loans. Indeed, in his new video Sallie Mae Back , Dee-1 boasts that instead of buying a Mercedes Maybach with his recording contract advance, he burned off his college note. The video was filmed in front of the football stadium at Louisiana State University, where Dee-1...

Making farmers markets more accessible to Americans in food deserts can boost the number of low-income customers who regularly shop there, and may even offer more promise for improving diets than bringing in traditional grocers. That's according to researchers who looked at what happened when the farmers market in Flint, Mich. much of which qualifies as a food desert moved downtown. Availability of nutritious foods is of particular relevance in Flint, where the city's water system is now...

With the Zika virus in the daily headlines, public health authorities should be looking carefully at how they communicate about this latest emerging infectious disease. People need to be alerted, not alarmed. That balance can be hard to strike when the health sources people turn to range from acquaintances on social media to politicians, instead of physicians and other medical professionals. The Ebola outbreak in 2014 demonstrated that many of the old rules about public health communication...

0.4 percent. That's the proportion of global development assistance that goes to mental illness prevention, care and treatment, according to Daniel Vigo. It's $1.5 billion of the $372 billion total health assistance spending around the world over the last 15 years. Vigo, a psychologist and psychiatrist at Harvard, believes that more money is needed. And he also believes that one reason the percentage is so low is that the world doesn't do a good job of assessing the number of people who...

Unhappy Child, Unhealthy Adult (Radio 4) | iPlayer In Therapy (Radio 4) | iPlayer The Forum: Anger (BBC World Service) | iPlayer Of late, the BBC has been focusing on mental health and its felt a little depressing, if you can excuse the term. Not because we shouldnt be talking about it clearly, we should but because the provision for mental health in this country is so utterly inadequate that almost every story you hear is a heartbreaker. Patients being shunted between A&E and police...

Ector County Commissioners approved applying for a grant from the Governors Office that would create a Veterans/Mental Health Court here. County Court-at-Law Judge Scott Layh said an amount for the grant has not been designated at this time. Layh said officials are hoping to be accepted for a specialty court and to receive some portion of the money for it from the state. The way the program works is theyre required to attend every hearing date we have and check in, make sure theyre attending...

At least 8.4 million Americans are providing care to an adult with an emotional or mental health issue, and nearly three quarters report that caregiving causes high emotional stress, finds a new study from the National Alliance for Caregiving in collaboration with Mental Health America and the National Alliance on Mental Illness. The study, On Pins & Needles: Caregivers of Adults with Mental Illness, identifies startling inadequacies in the U.S. health care system in meeting the needs of...

Imagine you are feeling sick and your doctor hands you this hand-scrawled prescription: LEECH THERAPY. If you are like me, you may run out of the doctors office screaming. At the very least, you probably seek out another doctor to prescribe a less invasive, more modern treatment, like, say antibiotics. Why dont we think of youth prisons the way we think of leeches? The youth prison model emerged at a time when bloodletting was still a common medical treatment. In the 1800s, a few states...

"The purpose of fear is to raise your awareness, not to stop your progress." Steve Maraboli I sat down to write this piece after reading a post about being "drugged by our parents"! And, let me tell you, I had an immediate visceral reaction. I felt sick to my stomach and I felt upset that we have to resort to fear mongering to get others to see that our points of view are superior. If you want to read that post, you can read it here . But, what really came to fruition to me: We really suck...

Title: Thats Not Cool: Mobilizing Youth Communities for Teen Dating Violence Prevention & Education Date: Tuesday, February 23rd, 2016 Description: Thats Not Cool is an award-winning national public education initiative that uses engaging digital tools to promote healthy relationships and prevent teen dating abuse. With our newly developed website, mobile apps, and an incredible community of youth organizers across the country, Thats Not Cool brings adult allies a vast of culturally...

On Feb. 15 the school board was asked to reflect on future needs. One includes adding a social worker next year whose pay would be split three ways -- $25,000 each -- between the school district, Pierce County and St. Croix County. Superintendent Jamie Benson referred to a couple of research studies that show how a trauma-filled childhood affects brain development and often leads to risk factors of alcoholism, suicidal tendencies, criminal behavior, anxiety, depression, diseases,...

When Karina Cabrera first sat down with Angelica,* a 15-year-old enrolled in Centinela Youth Services juvenile diversion program, the case manager remembers the youths icy stare and clipped answers. (* Angelicas name has been changed to protect her privacy.) Just weeks before, Angelica had been hauled in by members of the Los Angeles Police Department after she was caught trying to steal a shirt at Target. This was Angelicas first offense, but the teenager from South L.A. was quickly heading...