June 2018

When kids don’t have ways of managing their emotions, any activity can be difficult and challenging. Art with Heart resources provide kids with tools to help.

Indian Country remembers. This is not the first administration to order the forced separation of families. The Trump administration has initiated a zero-tolerance policy on the border. Zero tolerance means that people caught crossing the border are treated as criminals. On Friday, the Department of Homeland Security said the Trump administration separated 1,995 children from the adults they were traveling with at the U.S. border between April 19 and May 31. “The act of ripping children away...

When politicians and pundits talk about creating better jobs, they typically cite two strategies. The first, emphasized by economic nationalists and populists like President Trump, is to use trade and other policies to bring high-paying manufacturing jobs back to American soil. The second, emphasized by progressives, is to use education to prepare less advantaged workers for higher-paying jobs. But even if we did both, we would not put a significant dent in the jobs problem. The reality is...

There wasn’t a single empty seat among the six rows of wooden pews in Magistrate Judge J. Scott Hacker’s courtroom on Monday afternoon. The gallery was packed, its visitors jammed shoulder to shoulder, as if the public had crowded in to witness a momentous ruling or, perhaps, a celebrity trial. But the people who occupied these seats in the back of the courtroom were no mere observers—they were the defendants themselves. All 85 of them were immigrants charged with the same crime: illegal...

U.S. immigration agents raided an Ohio gardening company on June 5, arresting 114 suspected undocumented workers. This followed other large workplace raids , including a raid on a rural Tennessee meat-processing plant in April. The raids suggest the U.S. Department of Homeland Security is returning to sweeping immigration enforcement tactics not seen since the George W. Bush administration. While the immediate shock and trauma of these raids is visible, there are also longer-term impacts on...

According to a recent series of research briefs on youth and young adult homelessness by Chapin Hall at the University of Chicago, in the U.S., 1 in 10 young adults, or 3.5 million young people ages 18-25, experience homelessness in a year. Of that 3.5 million (73%) are homeless for one month or more. For those young adults, homelessness means a variety of experiences, ranging from sleeping outdoors, or in abandoned buildings, or in emergency shelters, to sleeping in cars, or “couch...

In the days and weeks following the suicides of celebrity chef Anthony Bourdain and handbag designer Kate Spade , a chorus of social media users urged people with depression to not be “afraid” to ask for help. But for most Americans, fear isn’t the thing that stands in the way of therapy. It’s having no one to turn to. This was the case for Sue, 57, who spent over 30 years trying to get effective treatment for bipolar disorder, depression, anxiety and a personality disorder. For years,...

The decline in life expectancy and health among less-educated white Americans is often attributed to “deaths of despair”—those from conditions like substance abuse and suicide. (Suicides, the CDC reported last week, are up nearly 30 percent since 1999.) The cause is often attributed to “cumulative distress,” as Princeton’s Anne Case and Angus Deaton have speculated . [For more of this story, written by Olga Khazan, go to ...

Many people who see reports of children separated from their parents might think that, because they’re not crying, that they’ve adjusted. Or, if they are crying, they’ll eventually stop and get over it. But, the reality is that those who participate in separating children from their parents and those who are caring for them in the detainment centers might as well be beating them with truncheons.

“It’s okay to tell me that you’re not okay.” Postpartum depression (PPD) and postpartum or perinatal mood and anxiety disorders (PMADs) are the most common medical concerns for women after childbirth. Yet few medical and mental health professionals really know how prevalent and serious PPD and PMADs are. There is a great need for better screening to identify women struggling with postpartum disorders. Likewise, more therapists and mental health providers need to know about treatment...

I recently finished a haunting novel, Before We Were Yours , in which Lisa Wingate tells a fictionalized account of the true story of one of this country’s great scandals, the Tennessee Children’s Home Society and its director, Georgia Tann. From the 1920s through 1950, Tann and her organization facilitated the adoption of thousands of children across the country. Tann was a prominent member of society, held up as the “Mother of Modern Adoption,” and consulted by Eleanor Roosevelt on issues...

Excerpt from Washington Post article written by Rene Denfeld: Full article.