Blog

Public health campaigns have proved a rare double success in American health care over the decades: They have drastically increased life spans, and often paid for themselves. Given that, it’s surprising that spending on public health today is so low, Aaron Carroll and Austin Frakt recently wrote in The Upshot. They are planning a follow-up article, consulting experts on which public health interventions would get the most bang for the buck in this era. But first we asked readers which health...

OK, so you've just left the hospital with your newborn baby. You're relieved, because the baby is healthy, your heart overflows with love and you're excited to begin this new chapter in your life. Then, most parents will tell you, on the way home a strange feeling sets in. It's as if you went to sleep in one world and woke up in another, a world that seems familiar but slightly off-key. As you gaze into the eyes of this fragile new being, it hits you: "What have I done?" And, more...

PTSD: Why Does It Happen? How Survivors Can Heal A traumatic event is something no one is prepared to deal with. You may feel your mind and body are in a state of shock from the experience. You may have nightmares, feel jumpy, or find yourself re-playing the event in your mind. You may even feel disconnected from the world around you. What happened was traumatic, and any person would feel shaken up. This is natural and human. For people who have enough resilience, the intense state of alarm...

In our book Anna, Age Eight, we ask readers to be courageous and reflect on a challenging reality. "Far away from you, on the other side of town, or the other side of the tracks, children live out perfectly miserable lives. If you’re a social worker, of course, this is what you face every day. If, on the other hand, you are like the rest of the American public, you take notice once in a while, perhaps engaging in a bit of head shaking. But for the most part, these boys and girls are out of...

ChangeLab Solutions creates healthier communities for all through better laws and policies. Check out Tools for Change , our resource catalog, for an overview of what we offer on our website. With your help , we can make healthy changes in every community. Contact us to learn how you can get involved! All people, no matter where they live, should benefit from a park where they can connect with neighbors, nature, and activities that matter to them. The Complete Parks approach is one way to...

My close friend and fellow Harvey Weinstein survivor, Lysette Anthony, wrote a response to the widely reported speech by Germaine Greer at the Hay Festival during which she claimed most rape doesn’t involve " any injury whatsoever " and that it should be viewed as merely a “ lazy, careless and insensitive ” act. If you read the reports more closely, you'll notice that Ms. Greer's use of the words ‘outrage’ and ‘humiliation’ and the suggestion that rapists should have an R tattooed on their...

We come from the point of view that ACEs is an epidemic, a major public health crisis that most lawmakers, new media and the public would prefer not to hear about. To wake people up we need major disruptions to business as usual. First, we need to start seeing email invites to rallies in front of city halls, county offices, and state houses, websites that demand real action, YouTube videos sharing stories around the emotional costs of trauma, new coalitions meeting weekly, and a linking of...

One thing businesses, organizations, and agencies can do to prevent adverse childhood experiences is to place sets of our fifty-one parenting tips bumper stickers on counters and tables where workers, customers, patients, and clients can help themselves. Parenting tips on vehicles will be read 1000s of times by 1000s of people of all ages for years to come! Also, businesses, organizations, and agencies can place the stickers on their fleet vehicles! Instead of a few human parenting educators...

I am often asked what we mean by a "data-driven, cross-sector and systemic strategy" for preventing childhood trauma and maltreatment. In our book Anna, Age Eight we provide the following definitions to guide our vital work with families and communities: Data-driven : Instead of the common government method – decisions based on hunches, what’s been done before, or the whim of the director, we base all our work on data. We’re swimming in excellent data and research that provides all the...

Russell Lowery-Hart spent a Texas winter weekend sleeping outside, even when a light rain fell and it grew so cold that he forced muddy shoes into his sleeping bag to warm his feet. By day, the 48-year-old became increasingly sunburned crisscrossing the streets of Waco, applying for fast-food jobs and searching for soup kitchens. He arrived at one charity at noon to find that lunch ended at 11:30; luckily, a homeless woman shared her cinnamon bread with him. He was unshowered and unshaven,...

Every day, a team of community health paramedics in Austin, Texas, fans out across the city to provide aid to the growing number of people on the streets. Finding the homeless isn’t always easy—Austin’s annual homeless census found that at any given time, more than 2,500 people are unsheltered; in a year, that number exceeds 7,000—and those are just the most obvious, countable cases. Harder still is finding their papers. “It’s a great anomaly to find someone who has all their identity...

Faced with overlapping controversies over its treatment of undocumented children, the Trump administration attempted this week to walk back previous statements that it had lost track of hundreds of undocumented children formerly in its care. Immigrant rights advocates disagreed about whether the administration should more closely monitor those children's whereabouts—but they were all unified in their outrage regarding the administration's ongoing separation of hundreds of migrant children...