July 2016

This article originally appeared on VICE US In 1998, Carol Redding's life was in a tailspin. She'd just gone through a breakup and was starting to lose control after what felt like a lifelong battle with nightmares, flashbacks, anxiety, depression, thyroid disease, and three bouts with cancer (leukemia, breast cancer, and lymphoma). A friend, who recognized symptoms of trauma, referred Redding to see Vincent Felliti, then head of Preventive Medicine at Kaiser Permanente in San Diego and a...

It’s all but impossible to dispute: Extreme wealth is growing in America. The top 1 percent accounted for less than 10 percent of total earned income in the 1970s. By the end of 2012, they held more than 20 percent, according to Emmanuel Saez, a professor at UC Berkeley. What’s more, between 1993 and 2012, the top 1 percent saw their incomes grow 86.1 percent, while the bottom 99 percent saw just 6.6 percent growth, according to Saez’s research . Wealth is not necessarily a bad thing. People...

Fewer students are using drugs and alcohol, but more feel harassed and bullied, a new health survey found. The California Healthy Kids Survey, done every two years since 1985, asked more than 36,000 middle and high school students across the state about campus safety, substance use, mental health and other issues. The California Department of Education and the California Department of Health Care Services coordinated the report, which takes a random sample of seventh-, ninth- and 11th-grade...

In an era when childhood trauma, toxic stress and grit are the leading buzzwords in children’s health circles, “resilience” is often trotted out as the answer to whatever horrible events people — young or old — have endured. Prevention is always king, the thinking goes, but when misery has already come to pass, building up resilience is our best bet for giving trauma victims a chance to move beyond their misfortune and live healthy, productive lives. Except that the knotty concept of...

New research now shows that even a brief period of stress can cause part of the brain involved in memory to start shrinking — even before changes are evident in behavior and memory itself. The region in question is the hippocampus, a pair of curved structures at the base of our brains. This brain region encodes memories of facts and events — names, phone numbers, dates, and daily events that we need to run our lives. “Until now, no one actually knew the evolution of these changes. Does the...

One trait that nearly all narcissistic parents have in common is the need to infantilize their children. This can be as direct as making the child feel incompetent every time they try something new, or it can be as subtle as always stepping in and offering to do something they can clearly do for themselves. Unfortunately, this behavior rarely stops even after the child becomes an adult. In fact, it can sometimes become worse as the narcissistic parent fears their children’s growing...

I told my grandmother that I started to going to therapy when I used to go a while ago, and the first thing she asked was, “What do you need therapy for?” I come from a background where family figures I admire don’t trust mental health professionals. I also come from a background where going to a professional is encouraged. But the side that doesn’t approve of therapy intimidated me the most and affected me the most. Just because one may experience depression and/or anxiety in their life,...

Professional development in the out-of-school-time (OST) field has been on an evolutionary curve in recent times. There has been an emphasis on building a solid professional development system for OST that has all the components needed for high-quality professional development supports for practitioners. A professional development system includes established core competencies, training opportunities, training and trainer approval processes, a professional registry, a career framework with...

Average adult heights in many countries appear to have peaked 30 to 40 years ago and have declined slightly since then, according to a new study that the authors say is based on the largest set of such data ever gathered. They combined results from 1,472 studies in 200 countries looking at the measured — rather than self-reported or estimated — heights of about 18.6 million people born from 1896 to 1996. The study was published in eLife. Dutchmen born before 2000 were the world’s tallest,...

In 2012, the Supreme Court ruled that sentencing a minor to life without the possibility of parole was cruel and unusual punishment. The ruling divided the court in a 5–4 decision, and Justice Samuel Alito read his dissenting opinion from the bench . “What the majority is saying is that members of society must be exposed to the risk that these convicted murderers, if released from custody, will murder again,” Alito said, adding that the Supreme Court “has no license to impose our vision of...

Have you ever been saved by an animal? Today I want to share how I was saved by a siamese cat and the value of animals to alleviate Childhood Toxic Stress when physical escape from trauma is not an option. From Appreciation and Love For 21 years I’ve shared my life with a sweet little squirrel of a Siamese (I like to call her), my Savannah. She is nearing the end now and there is no easy way to say good-bye. Because of my intense feelings around animals since childhood where the only relief...

David Ross walks the halls of the University of Maryland's Shock Trauma Center dressed in scrubs. He waits for victims of stabbings, shootings, and assaults to recover from their injuries—and then makes his move. As those patients are stabilized and begin to feel better, Ross approaches. He begins somewhat informally, speaking to them like a friend, a guy the victim might bump into on the street. "When they are the most vulnerable, it's the best time to get them into service," said Ross, a...