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"most at-risk kids can be spotted early... ...learning to manage what makes us different and often difficult could change a trajectory that leads to tragedy." writes Maia Szalavitz, the author of "Unbroken Brain: A Revolutionary New Way of Understanding Addiction." http://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/04/well/family/the-4-traits-that-put-kids-at-risk-for-addiction.html?_r=0

Almost four million American teenagers have just started their freshman year of high school. Can they learn better ways to deal with all that stress and insecurity? New research suggests they can. Though academic and social pressures continue to pile on in high school, teenagers can be taught effective coping skills to skirt the pitfalls of anxiety and depression. David S. Yeager, an assistant professor of psychology at the University of Texas at Austin and a leading voice in the growing...

Controversy erupted in 2014 when video of National Football League player Ray Rice violently punched his fiancé (now wife) and dragged her unconscious body from an elevator. Most recently, Deadspin released graphic images of the injuries NFL player Greg Hardy inflicted on his ex-girlfriend. In both instances, NFL officials insisted that, if they had seen the visual evidence of the crime, they would have implemented harsher consequences from the onset. Why are violent images so much more...

There are a lot of things to envy about youth: clear skin, perfect hair, boundless energy. But nothing says young like a good set of telomeres. We’ve all got them, but if you’re past a certain age, you don’t want to think about them too much. Telomeres are the protein caps at the end of chromosomes that act as a sort of mortal fuse: the older you get the shorter they grow, a process that contributes to all manner of age-related diseases and breakdowns. Telomere length can be affected by...

The front door of Nora Nivia Nevarez’s adobe-like house in suburban Albuquerque, New Mexico, opens to blocks and children’s books scattered around the brightly colored carpet, shaped like a puzzle piece. Throughout the afternoon, she keeps a careful eye on her four small charges, ages 4 months to 10 years, by turns reading books and helping them with puzzles. One little boy named Javier cries as his guardian, Guadalupe, picks him up. He’s tired and ready to go home. “I love caring for...

“The great force of history,” James Baldwin once wrote, “comes from the fact that we carry it within us, are unconsciously controlled by it in many ways, and history is literally present in all that we do. It could scarcely be otherwise, since it is to history that we owe our frames of reference, our identities, and our aspirations.” Though written long ago, Baldwin’s words about the power and complexity of history certainly inform an understanding of the new National Museum of African...

The first sign that not everything is normal as you drive down Highway 1806 toward the Standing Rock reservation in North Dakota is a checkpoint manned by camouflage-clad National Guard troops. The inspection on Sept. 13 was perfunctory; they simply asked if we knew “what was going on down the road” and then waved us through, even though the car we rode in had “#NoDAPL” chalked on its rear windshield. “What is going on down the road” is a massive camp-in led by the Standing Rock nation,...

As a Certified Prevention Specialist for Wasco County, I am often asked at what age should a parent start talking to their child about the risks of alcohol, tobacco and other drugs. My answer to that question has dramatically changed over the last several years and it has to do with a combination of 6 letters . . . SEL and ACEs. SEL stands for Social Emotional Learning and ACEs stands for Adverse Childhood Experiences. These two acronyms are receiving attention individually but YouthThink...

The revelation that The Boss, Bruce Springsteen, suffered from major depression for a good part of his life should not come as a revelation to those of us who have had bouts with depression. [ STORY LINK ] The ACE Study revealed that about 23% of the population will experience depression at some point in our lives. [ LINK HERE ] Women suffer at a rate about 10 percentage points higher than men do, but when you think of the U.S. population, there are a lot of us. A second story, where the...

Eloy Oakley isn’t shy about his plans to be much more “proactive” than previous chancellors when he takes over California’s mammoth community-college system in December. “We’re going to take on a much more aggressive agenda with a clear lens on social justice and equity,” Oakley, who is in his final weeks as head of the Long Beach Community College District, told me during an interview at his office on the Long Beach City College campus. Oakley, who is himself a product of the system and a...

In 2010, Jan Banning made a trip to Uganda to photograph prisons. A Dutch photographer , Banning had spent much of the previous decade traveling between eight different countries to document the lives of civil servants . Backgrounding that project was a more difficult subject that Banning found increasingly impossible to ignore: the criminal justice system. Banning’s arrival in Uganda marked the beginning of his latest work, Law & Order : The World of Criminal Justice , which he...

The Northeast ― especially Massachusetts ― is the healthiest place in the country for women and children to live, according to the “America’s Health Rankings” report published this month by United Health Foundation. The report compared all 50 states based on 60 health measures in four categories: health behavior of residents, policy, socio-structural factors and health care. The researchers looked specifically at women’s health. They analyzed factors including the rate of sexually...