January 2016

A little less than two years ago, a group of ACEs activists from Memphis came to a meeting of the Philadelphia ACEs Task Force and made a site visit to the 11th Street Family Health Services for “information and enlightenment,” according to Chris Peck, a member of the six-person delegation. Since then, these and other leaders in Tennessee are poised to take what they have started in Memphis statewide, demonstrating that ACEs research has the power to galvanize communities and...

Almost a decade ago, I wrote an email to the director of the Alaska Division of Family and Youth Services to introduce them to the concept of Lean Government. I got no response. I spoke to our Alaska GOvernor and his Chief of Staff about the promise of Lean Government for improving the quality of our children and social services, and got just the political response. Our Governor committed to a second meeting to talk about ACE’s. I am currently working to get a meeting with the Governor...

Transcendental meditation may help ease post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) symptoms in some soldiers and seems to reduce their need for medication, a new study finds. "Regular practice of transcendental meditation provides a habit of calming down and healing the brain," study lead author Vernon Barnes, a physiologist at the Georgia Prevention Institute at the Medical College of Georgia, said in a college news release. The study included 74 active-duty U.S. military personnel with PTSD or...

B efore solitary confinement became a widely acknowledged national problem—before the hunger strikes and class-action lawsuits , before the Senate hearings , before a Supreme Court justice’s condemnation of the “human toll wrought by extended terms of isolation,” before corrections leaders described holding more than 80,000 prisoners alone in a cell for 23 hours a day as a “grave problem”—Catherine Bauman did something a bit less dramatic. She...

An increasing number of college students are seeking help for mental health issues, at a rate outpacing the growth in enrollment by five-fold, a new report shows. Data collected at 139 college and university counseling centers, from 2009-2010 through 2014-2015, reflects "slow but consistent" growth in students reporting depression, anxiety and social anxiety. And 20 percent of students seeking mental health treatment, the report found, are taking up about half of all campus counseling...

To handle stress and adversity more effectively, we should probably pay closer attention to what is happening inside our bodies, according to a fascinating new brain study of resilience and why some people seem to have more of it than others. We live in difficult times, as readers of this newspaper know well. Worries about the state of our world, our safety, our finances, health and more can lead to a variety of physiological and psychological responses. [For more of this story, written by...

Raise your hand if you've ever said "I'm sorry" when you weren't actually sorry. *raises hand* It's kind of a common thing. It's so common, in fact, that someone developed a plugin for Gmail called Just Not Sorry that actually catches and underlines the word sorry in your emails. "I'm sorry to bother you, but..." Does that sound familiar? It is for a lot of people in the workplace, especially women. It's not just a work thing or a woman thing, though. Lots of people say they're sorry when...

When I was finishing my book on time pressure and modern life and casting about for ideas for a book cover, a well-meaning editor of mine said he had a great one: “Picture this,” he said excitedly, “a woman in a business suit and high heels in soft focus. Steering a grocery cart.” I groaned. The idea screamed “For Women Only.” And for too long, that’s where we’ve been stuck as a society when it comes to thinking about how we work and live. As...

For years the percentage of Native Hawaiians in the state’s foster care system has significantly topped the percentage of Hawaiians in the overall population of children statewide. Those with Hawaiian blood make up half the roughly 2,300 children who have been removed from their families because of abuse and neglect concerns and currently are in foster care. Yet Hawaiians comprise only a third of the statewide population of minors. No one knows for sure why Hawaiians persistently have...

Mental health patients going through a psychotic episode are set to be spared time in prison cells by a new service. Dyfed-Powys Police launched a pilot project in January 2015, where a triage van was sent to their aid. This has since prevented more than 100 people being kept in cells under the mental health act and assisted 180 others in west Wales. The service is now set to become a permanent fixture in the force's areas, BBC Wales understands. Instead of arresting the patient, the van is...

As a graduate student at Harvard in the mid-1990s, I participated in research studies carried out by the psychology department that began in October 1996 and continued until August 2005 to interview adults who had experience sexual abuse as children and learn what effects the abuse had had on their lives. Although I was sure I knew what I would discover—that the abuse would be remembered as a horrible experience that overwhelmed the people I interviewed with fear when it happened and...

John Ioannidis, the “ scourge of sloppy science”   has documented again and again that the safeguards being introduced into the biomedical literature against untrustworthy findings are usually inconsistent and ineffective. In Ioannidis’ most recent report , his group: …Assessed the current status of reproducibility and transparency addressing these indicators in a random sample of 441 biomedical journal articles published in 2000–2014. Only one study...