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The sixth principle of the Child and Adolescent Service System Program principles is that service selection must be: Least restrictive/least intrusive: Services take place in settings that are the most appropriate and natural for the child and family and are the least restrictive and intrusive available to meet the needs of the child and family. If we look at this from a trauma informed perspective, it comes down to control over one’s own choices. Here are two important considerations: If a...

When local newspapers shut their doors, communities lose out. People and their stories can’t find coverage. Politicos take liberties when it’s nobody’s job to hold them accountable. What the public doesn’t know winds up hurting them. The city feels poorer, politically and culturally. According to a new working paper, local news deserts lose out financially, too. Cities where newspapers closed up shop saw increases in government costs as a result of the lack of scrutiny over local deals, say...

Staying mentally sharp—that's aging Americans' highest priority, according to the National Council on Aging. While thousands of clinical trials suggest that exercising the body can protect or improve brain health as we age, few studies provide practical prescriptive guidance for how much and what kind of exercise. Now, an exhaustive systematic review of 4,600 clinical trials—led by researchers at the Berenson-Allen Center for Noninvasive Brain Stimulation at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical...

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...

When Julie Eldred tested positive for fentanyl in 2016, 11 days into her probation for a larceny charge, she was sent to jail. Such outcomes are typical in the American criminal justice system, even though, as Ms. Eldred’s lawyer has argued, ordering a drug addict to abstain from drug use is tantamount to mandating a medical outcome — because addiction is a brain disease, and relapsing is a symptom of it. Ms. Eldred’s case, now before the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court, has the...

Justin Napier is exactly the kind of community college graduate Tennessee was hoping for. In high school, Napier didn't have his eye on college. In fact, he had a job lined up working on race cars after graduation. But in the spring of 2014, a year before Napier graduated, Gov. Bill Haslam announced a plan to make community college free for graduating high school seniors, part of a broader plan to dramatically increase the number of adults in Tennessee with college credentials. It was...

I didn’t think our relationship would last, but neither did I think it would end so soon. My patient had struggled with bipolar disorder his entire life, and his illness dominated our years together. He had, in a fit of hopelessness, tried to take his life with a fistful of pills. He had, in an episode of mania, driven his car into a tree. But the reason I now held his death certificate — his sister and mother in tears by his bed — was more pedestrian: a ruptured plaque in his coronary...

This infographic from FPG's Race, Culture, and Ethnicity Committee is the fourth in a public awareness series that addresses racial inequity. Please note: What Racism Looks Like was originally designed for a poster format and will require zooming in on some sections to view as a PDF. [To download this infographic, go to http://fpg.unc.edu/resources/what-racism-looks-infographic ]

You have an important deadline at work, and you need take the car to the repair shop. You skip breakfast, drop off the car, and get a ride to your job. By noon your stomach is growling. Just before lunch, your boss walks up and asks you to take care of something urgent. What do you do? We depend on our boundaries help us cope with challenges every day. They are a necessary part of life, but they can be hard to define exactly. What does it mean to have healthy boundaries, and how do you put...

The medical profession now broadly recognizes that there is much more to good health than having affordable access to excellent medical care. In particular, housing difficulties are seen as comprising an important determinant in the underlying health condition of many families, and they often are a factor in acute episodes of illness. Poor living conditions can trigger such developments as respiratory problems and stress-related illness, and many falls and hospitalizations among elderly...

RSVP here for this free awesome event! The Healthy and Ready to Learn Resource and Training Center is excited to present our second annual workshop day. Join us for this FREE event as we look ahead to next school year and discuss new tools and resources to keep students engaged from day one. New workshops, presented by partner organizations across NYC, will focus on reducing health barriers to learning, trauma-sensitive classroom approaches, and attendance best practices. Breakfast will be...

It’s the last week of May, which means thousands of high school students are graduating, crossing the stage and stepping into adulthood while their families break the “no clapping until the end” rule out of sheer joy. Every student overcomes obstacles on their way to graduation, but many do so while dealing with the kind of instability that most adults couldn’t cope with. According to a study by the US Department of Housing and Urban Development, the percentage of homeless people in families...