May 2018

Oklahoma’s 128 tribal casinos host 46 million visits and rake in $4.5 billion a year – but there isn’t a single billboard in the state that tells problem gamblers where they can find help. “We can’t afford it. It costs $1,200 to $1,400 a month for a billboard,” said Wiley D. Harwell, executive director of the Oklahoma Association for Problem and Compulsive Gambling. With $186,000 from the state and about $100,000 from Indian tribes and other donations annually, Harwell’s group operates a...

BALTIMORE—Racial inequality in Baltimore’s public schools is in part the byproduct of long-standing neglect . In a system in which eight out of 10 students are black, broken heaters forced students to learn in frigid temperatures this past winter. Black children in Baltimore’s education system face systemic disadvantages: They’re suspended at much higher rates than their white peers; they rarely pass their math or reading tests; their campuses are chronically underfunded . Yet this stark...

Treating opioid use disorder among homeless families can reduce hepatitis C transmission, infant drug withdrawal, and overdose, which is the leading cause of death among people experiencing homelessness. Although office-based treatment is effective for homeless patients, homelessness (especially among families) creates barriers to office-based opioid treatment, such as stigma, child care needs, or distance from an office site. To reduce barriers to treatment, the Family Team at the Boston...

Recently, I emailed a carpenter to ask him to repair some minor damage to the roof of our Toronto home, inflicted by the harsh winter. He told me he’d had it with Toronto’s high housing prices and had moved back to the West Coast. Then, when I asked a friend of mine if there was someone he would recommend, he told me the roofer heused had just moved to Ireland. He’d signed off his last email: “Nobody can afford to live in this city!” My experience in Toronto is far from unique. In fact, it’s...

The tall, gangly man twists a cone of paper in his hands as stories from nearly 30 years of addiction pour out: the robbery that landed him in prison at age 17; never getting his high school equivalency diploma; going through the horrors of detox, maybe 40 times, including this latest bout, which he finished two weeks ago. He’s now in a residential treatment unit for at least 30 days. “I’m a serious addict,” said Julio Cesar Santiago, 44. “I still have dreams where I’m about to use drugs,...

Starbucks has an ambitious plan to try to address discrimination and unconscious bias by training nearly 175,000 of its workers one afternoon later this month. Following the inappropriate arrest of two black men at one of its stores in Philadelphia, Starbucks announced it would close more than 8,000 U.S. stores on May 29 to conduct racial-bias training. No company has tried such training on this scale, says an expert advising the coffee chain, and the effort puts the science of behavioral...

Several recent research reports show childhood suicides increasing at a dramatic rate. Research published May 16, 2018, Pediatrics shows the number of school-age children and adolescents hospitalized for thinking about or attempting suicide has more than doubled since 2008. Additionally, research published in late 2017 in Clinical Psychological Science showed increases in suicide attempts and successful suicides increased among teens across all races and ethnicities, and in every region of...

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) on Tuesday appointed Tony Perkins, president of the anti-LGBTQ hate group Family Research Council, to the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF). The independent and bipartisan federal commission “reviews the facts and circumstances of religious freedom violations abroad and makes policy recommendations to the President, the Secretary of State, and Congress.” Three of its commissioners are appointed by the president, and one...

Even some of the most powerful tech companies start out tiny, with a young innovator daydreaming about creating the next big thing. As today’s tech firms receive increased moral scrutiny, it raises a question about tomorrow’s: Is that young person thinking about the tremendous ethical responsibility they’d be taking on if their dream comes true? Greg Epstein, the recently appointed humanist chaplain at MIT, sees his new role as key to helping such entrepreneurial students think through the...

California gubernatorial candidates John Chiang (D), Delaine Eastin (D) and Antonio Villaraigosa (D) headlined a forum last night dedicated to the issues facing the state’s most vulnerable children and families. Before an estimated crowd of 600 in Los Angeles, the candidates offered their views on the state’s foster care and juvenile justice systems and also tackled other issues, such as child poverty, educational equity, children’s health and children’s access to technology. Leading...

The Relentless School Nurse: Speaking Truth to Power in a Collaborative Op-Ed The power of social media cannot be underestimated! A few short months ago, I connected with Sunny Hallowell, PhD, RN, a Nurse Faculty from Villanova University on Twitter. Sunny had just returned from Florida where she was presenting Nursing Rounds at a Miami hospital the day of the Parkland shootings. When she returned home, her 5-year-old son shared his experience during his school’s active shooter drill. Sunny...

Empathy is the behavioral manifestation of respect