June 2018

After the October fires, the Community Foundation of Sonoma County co-sponsored a survey of local nonprofit organizations to gauge the effect that the disaster had on the people they serve and their organizational capacity to provide services in response. Throughout the “2018 Wildfire Response Survey,” mental health was consistently cited among the top three impacts of the wildfires. Since 2016, the Hanna Institute, a program based at the Hanna Boys Center on Arnold Drive, has trained...

Growing up in public housing in North Charleston, S.C., in the 1970s, David Hayward was familiar with poverty, violence and loss. His mother, grandmother and brother all died when he was young, and his father was in prison. He became addicted to alcohol and cocaine and occasionally lived under bridges and in abandoned buildings, he says. Over the years, his rap sheet grew: At least 15 arrests, mostly for minor crimes like driving with a suspended license and possession of drug paraphernalia...

In my more exasperated moments of residency, I must admit I was envious not only of what my supervising doctors knew, but also who they treated. Residents in our clinic, doctors in training just out of medical school, generally picked up patients they cared for in the hospital — with lots of medical problems, little medical care and often without a place to stay. The attending physicians who supervised us, it seemed, built their patient panels handing out business cards in luxury suites at...

According to the latest World Inequality Report , inequality is like the world's oceans: almost everywhere, and rising all the time. The United States is no exception. Its wealth gap today is as large as it's been since the turn of the 20th century. The authors of the report sound genuinely alarmed. "If rising inequality is not properly monitored and addressed," they warn us, "it can lead to various sorts of political, economic, and social catastrophes." One of the report's authors is the...

Many people struggle to take a compliment. It doesn’t matter if the compliment comes from a loved one, a stranger, or a trusted source, like a therapist. The struggle goes much deeper than manners, modesty, or cultural norms. I’m talking about the inability to accept what therapists call positive affect. The issue for some is about feeling, deep down, that you don’t deserve it, that you can’t believe it, that as a person you are not worthy, and that you can’t allow or take in the experience...

Suicide Graphic: National Council for Behavioral Health The alarming increase in suicide rates in the United States over the past two decades is unprecedented and beyond disturbing. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention just released research reporting “suicide increased by 25 percent across the United States from 1999 to 2016 and a shocking 45,000 Americans age 10 or older died by suicide in 2016.” The American Psychological Association calls suicide prevention a public health...

As part of the rollout of Growing Resilient Communities 2.0 late last year, we provided communities with an interactive tool that maps the presentations a local ACEs science initiative does in that community. So far, nearly 20 communities, out of about 150 on ACEs Connection, have launched presentation trackers, including Maryland and Arkansas. (A full list is at the bottom of this blog post.) Growing Resilience Communities 2.0 provides communities basic guidelines to growing their ACEs...

Photo/ CreativeCommons Would pregnant women participate in surveys from their doctors asking them about whether they had experienced trauma in their childhood? In surveying moms-to-be at two Northern California Kaiser sites, clinicians discovered that the women were receptive to filling out an adverse childhood experiences (ACE) survey, according to a study that was published earlier this year in the Journal of Women’s Health. In fact, researchers found out that the vast majority of pregnant...

Excerpts from article written by Shaila Dewan . To read the rest of this article in the New York Times by Shaila Dewan, go here .

Excerpt from essay published on the Attachment & Trauma Network blog and written by @Julie Beem The read the rest of Julie Beem's blog post, go here .

Early this year, a group of boys from Seattle’s Catholic, all-boys O’Dea High School attended a party. As football players from a team that would go on to win the state championship, they were influential among their friends. At the party, a couple of the players noticed an escalating sexual encounter involving another boy they knew that didn’t look quite right. “It was a shady situation,” a group of girls who had been at the party latertold the O’Dea football coach, James Beck, who gathered...

Ten large technology companies in Silicon Valley did not employ a single black woman in 2016. Three had no black employees at all. Six did not have a single female executive. In stark contrast, women outnumbered men in the executive ranks of two Silicon Valley companies, and at another firm, nearly a third of executives were women of color. A first-of-its kind analysis of 177 of the largest San Francisco Bay Area tech firms by Reveal from The Center for Investigative Reporting found that...