n prison, Rodney Jones told me, everyone had a nickname. Jones’s was Saint E’s, short for St. Elizabeths, the federal psychiatric hospital in Washington, best known for housing John Hinckley Jr. after he shot Ronald Reagan. Jones...
There is a consensus among poverty experts that over the past 50 years there has been some improvement in the condition of the poor. “Anyone who studies the issue seriously understands that material poverty has continued to fall in the...
In 2010, Common Ground, a homeless services and supportive housing provider, launched an effort to house some of the most vulnerable people in the country. They called it the 100,000 Homes Campaign. The following year, a group within Common...
The Department of Health and Social Services held a conference on Wednesday focused on raising awareness and promoting resources for victims of traumatic experiences. The “Trauma Matters” conference took place at Delaware Technical...
The boy sat hunched over, looking at the floor, his arms crossed and his hands clenched on his knees. A good-looking kid, with the round face of a child and light brown hair, this boy was one step away from being charged with breaking and...
Few topics are so heavily shrouded in mystery and myth as those involving sex and sexuality. When it comes to adolescents’ sexual behavior, these mysteries can contribute to a variety of negative outcomes, including unplanned pregnancies...
By David Shern, Ph.D. and Andrea Blanch, Ph.D. Whenever doing the right thing and doing the smart thing coincide, it increases the chances that something will happen. Elsewhere, we have presented data demonstrating that investments in...
Something an ex-girlfriend told Tom Sartwell decades ago, when he was 19 years old, has stuck with him his entire adult life. “When she broke up with me, the words she used were, ‘You couldn’t possibly love me. You never hit...
Mark Lukach and his wife were doing what most twenty-something couples are doing a few years into a marriage: They were building their careers and planning a family. Until the night he got a glimpse into a future that would be different than...
Colleges are scrambling to re-evaluate mental health resources after several university students have taken their lives in the past academic year. Arizona State University has now seen three suicides this year, the Massachusetts Institute of...
The scene was tense: Two Los Angeles Police officers approach a man yelling and screaming at the end of a cul de sac. He looks angry and aggressive as he paces back and forth in the middle of the street. “I just got back two weeks...
At Partner for Healing we get a lot of questions about implementing trauma-informed care in child serving agencies. We want to help in the most powerful way we can. What are your questions? What do you wish you knew about trauma-informed care...
The students were perched around a table inside Millennium High School in Brooklyn, listening intently as their guest spoke of the maladies and pangs of adolescence. “It doesn’t matter what anybody else is dealing with,”...
The number of jobs in human services in Massachusetts grew by 48 percent between 2003 and 2011, according to a new report examining the economic impact of the human services industry. In 2011, there were 145,000 human service worker jobs in...
When This American Life dedicated two episodes to law enforcement in the United States, they titled them, "Cops See It Differently." Citing examples like the NYPD killing of Eric Garner, which gave rise to the "I...