October 2017

There was a time not long ago when this reporter was, shall we say, stretched a bit thin. At night, she lay in her bed, which was covered with laundered and not-yet-folded yoga pants, attempting to gain respite. Yet none would come. Instead, she would play mental chess with various cost-benefit analyses, or she would arrange and rearrange her mental to-do list, as though, like so much broccoli under a pile of mashed potatoes, moving it around a bit would make it disappear. Then, this...

CALOUA LOWE BOUNDS up the rickety, worn staircase of a three-story, red brick building in Camden, New Jersey on a sunny September morning, the wooden steps creaking under the pressure of her red-sandaled feet. The walls display framed, Photoshopped images: a mockup of Vogue, album covers featuring young men standing shoulder to shoulder with rap legends like Jay-Z. They were designed by the roughly 1,200 youths who, like Lowe, have come here over the years to learn Photoshop, HTML,...

It was the murder of a beloved patient that led to a seismic shift in the Women’s HIV Program at the University of California, San Francisco : a move toward a model of trauma-informed care. “She was such a soft and gentle person,” said Dr. Edward Machtinger, the medical director of the program, who recalled how utterly devastated he and the entire staff were by her untimely death. “This murder woke us up,” he said. ”It just made us take a deeper look at what was actually happening in the...

The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation recently released a national survey of children's health that shows almost half of American kids experience traumatic experiences. The study was produced by CAHMI, the Child and Adolescent Health Measurement Initiative . Martha Davis is Senior Program Officer at the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. She is disturbed by the compendium in the 2016 edition of the National Survey of Children's Health and an analysis conducted by CAHMI. "What it shows is a state...

In her inaugural speech as the head of the Royal College of General Practitioners recently, Professor Helen Stokes-Lampard chose to focus her remarks on loneliness. “GPs see patients, many of whom are widowed, who have multiple health problems,” she said. “But often their main problem isn’t medical. They’re lonely. These patients need someone to listen to them, and to find purpose in life.” Stokes-Lampard is not the first leading medical professional to express concern about the impact that...

SANTA ROSA - Teacher Linda Severs lost her school but not her house. Parent Matt Todhunter lost his home but not the school his children attended. And Debra Sanders, who has spent the last six years providing school services for homeless families, suddenly found her own family in that same classification. Northern California’s Oct. 8 wildfires were among the most destructive in U.S. history, and in Sonoma County, they uprooted an entire school system. As the fires raged, nearly all of the...

The Leading Health Indicators (LHIs) are high-priority health issues in the United States that serve as measures of the Nation’s health. Each month HealthyPeople.gov displays 1 or more infographics to visually communicate the existing health disparities for the featured LHI. If you would like the monthly infographic and bulletin sent straight to your inbox, sign up for Healthy People email updates . To access the Leading Health Indicators Infographic Gallery, go to h...

The past few days I have been reviewing materials and whittling down what I will present for my upcoming workshop this Thursday, "Learn to Build a Trauma Informed System." I find myself overwhelmed; there is ample information to share and not enough time in one day to share it. The Stanford Social Innovation Review ( https://ssir.org/ ) - which is an esteemed clearinghouse of information on how to accomplish complex social change - is the kind of place "systems-minded" thinkers geek out. If...

Teachers across the country are being priced out of local housing markets by low pay, according to a new analysis of 124 of America’s largest districts by the National Council on Teacher Quality. Three key findings: In 80 percent of the districts analyzed, a teacher with a master’s degree and five years of experience cannot comfortably afford a mortgage. More than a quarter of new teachers cannot afford to rent one-bedroom apartments where they work. Teachers must save for an average of 10...

Max Weissman, an adolescent counselor in Asheville, says cyberbullying is an issue that comes up all too often — by parents, educators and victims themselves — though often not directly. “Hardly anyone has come to me for therapy for bullying, though I’d say half the people I work with have been bullied, and that’s a topic we talk about,” he says. Weissman has had his own private practice, Counseling WNC, for two years, but he’s been counseling and working with adolescents in and out of the...

We live in a democracy, but many Americans do not vote. Turnout in presidential election years hovers around 60 percent, and it can be much lower otherwise. What’s going on? Perhaps many voters do not feel informed enough to make decisions. At first glance, it would seem that a little information is all that’s needed, like simply reading up on candidate positions or quickly researching the best way to get to a polling place. But could there be an emotional obstacle to voting? [For more on...

A relatively small force of community social workers played a significant role in preventing 165,000 premature deaths across the U.S. in 2015. Our recently concluded research indicates that they did this by guiding at-risk men and women to preventive treatments and early detection of common killers, such as colon cancer and diabetes. Let's set aside, for a moment, the moral victory represented by each life saved and look at what this means from the standpoint of exploding medical costs and...