August 2017

In 1968, Martin Luther King Jr. and his allies started the Poor People’s Campaign, a movement meant to improve the lives of low-income Americans. But King was assassinated a few months before its political actions officially kicked off, and the campaign never reached its full potential. Fifty years later, Rev. William Barber, head of the North Carolina NAACP, is joining other religious and activist leaders to launch a new Poor People’s Campaign, picking up where King left off. Although King...

Guest George Patrin, MD , U.S. Army COL was a pediatrician in the Army for over 23 years and understands the needs of veterans. When his 17-year old son, under the care of military clinics at the time, took his own life, George and his wife Pam had their world changed forever. Though he participated in VA therapy, and worked in the transition from Walter Reed to Bethesda helping others, the “cloak of depression and grief” would not lift. Through association with the famous Patch Adams...

When I first met 4-year-old Kole, he would barely speak. When he did, his voice was adorably raspy. When I asked how he was feeling, using a “feelings chart” as a visual aid, he responded by vomiting in the corner of the room. He seemed to be suffering from intense anxiety. His mother, who I’ll call Vera, told me that Kole does not trust new people, for reasons I’d soon come to learn. Vera was a victim of domestic violence, and Kole witnessed many instances of abuse during his earliest...

Here is the text of a post I just put on LINKEDIN. I think it will be of interest to readers, especially those involved in education. Text: History should not be forgotten -- even recent history. We can try repression; we can try denial. We can try omission for textbooks and speeches. We can refuse to acknowledge. We can pretend it did not happen. We can operate as if time could be rewound. We can treat the past as "past." We can psychologically trick ourselves into thinking that what is...

Work these days often comes with long hours, emotionally draining colleagues, and complex problems that require an enormous amount of mental energy. So it’s no surprise that many of us have a hard time leaving work-related thoughts at the office. “Surveys have shown that between 16 and 25 percent of the workforce have regular issues of not being able to switch off and are upset or distressed by work-related thoughts,” says Mark Cropley , a professor of health psychology at the University of...

Growing up in the South, I was told (and unfortunately believed) a number of things about the Confederacy. Of course, I heard the common Southern sentiment that the Civil War was about states’ rights and definitely not slavery, but I was also told that the Confederate generals were upstanding and honorable men, while the Union generals consisted of morally corrupt misfits. I was told that many Southern slaveowners treated their slaves well (aside from the whole “forcing them to be slaves”...

Facebook’s On This Day feature — typically useful for reminding us of questionable fashion or relationship choices we’ve made in the past — recently showed me a status I made on the day Robin Williams died. I remember feeling torn apart that day — heartbroken by the news. I wrote a status that ended with “please seek help”, a phrase that now stings when I read the words. [For more of this story, written by Deirdre Fidge, go to http://junkee.com/just-seek-help/119695]

Kimberly Greer can’t sleep. Almost every night for the better part of four years, she has woken up in the dark. The numbers on her clock flash 3:30 a.m. Greer rouses at this hour most nights, haunted by the faces of her son, Ricky, her daughter, Ryann, and her nephew, Jordan — three of the hundreds of Chicago’s victims of gun violence. One survived. Two did not. But they all come back in the hours she can’t sleep. “I’m traumatized,” she says, thinking about the people she’s lost. Her...

That’s how Ravi Ragbir sees the trauma that engulfs his long and scarring deportation battle. It didn’t spare his mental health: sudden spasms of sadness, his chest closing up, tears choking his throat, his heart racing. They’re all signs that he’s getting too close to the lake — the imaginary place where he confines his suffering. “I don’t want to fall in; I will break down,” says Ragbir. The water is a psychological tool he uses to curb his recurring emotional anguish. “I basically shut...

Melissa Rivera always turned off the cameras before she binged. Newly married to a husband who traveled frequently, the 23-year-old med student, who had recently moved six hours from her friends and family, comforted herself with food. “I’d get this whole pizza that I would eat myself,” she says. Each time, she turned off the house’s security system so her husband wouldn’t see the coping mechanism she’d used since she was 8 years old. “At some point, I realized, ‘This is killing me. I cannot...

Fifty years ago, an MIT professor created a chatbot that simulated a psychotherapist. Named Eliza, it was able to trick some people into believing it was human. But it didn’t understand what it was told, nor did it have the capacity to learn on its own. The only test it had to pass was: Could it fool humans? These days, with robotics advancing to drive cars, beat humans at chess and Go!, and replace entire workforces, Eliza’s smoke and mirrors is child’s play. Researchers now build chatbots...

Join Michele Gay at the 2017 Resilience Summit in Chicago, October 16-18. Michele Gay is the co-founder and executive director of Safe and Sound: A Sandy Hook Initiative. Following the tragic loss of her daughter, Josephine, in the Sandy Hook School tragedy, Michele joined Sandy Hook mother Alissa Parker to establish Safe and Sound Schools as a national resource for school safety. Michele's presentation will include: Specific knowledge and awareness of the needs for school community in...