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I hope that you’ve enjoyed the future of mental health interview series. More than 110 interviews have appeared! You can find the complete roster with live links to the interviews here . If you’ve missed some of the interviews, do take a look at the roster: there are many valuable and eye-opening interviews to be had. In this post I’d like to provide a few concluding thoughts, including a few top tips for reducing mental distress. If you’d like to keep abreast of the future of mental health...

[First of three articles] Ten years ago, Patsy Hite, 70, rarely left her home at night. “I heard a lot of sirens so I always kept to myself,” she said. Hite lives in the Highlands, a 40-block section in Longview, a city in Cowlitz County in southwestern Washington. The Highlands is home to about 5,000 residents. The neighborhood is adjacent to an industrial district, and was hit hard by the loss of jobs in the timber and manufacturing industries. Long-term unemployment has brought blight,...

[ Ed. note: Following is a media release published yesterday by Mathematica Policy Research. This follows on the heals of the report, "Self-Healing Communities" that Laura Porter, Dr. Robert Anda and WHO wrote for the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. Both reports and executive summaries are attached to this blog post. Both reports are significant, because they show that community ACEs initiatives -- with "modest investments and limited staff" -- are solving some of our most intractable...

Social activist and former foster care youth Shenandoah Chefalo was forced to move 50 times during her childhood, and that experience coupled with her ideas to improve the foster care system that she survived resulted in her book, “Garbage Bag Suitcase.” The book, which took over four years of research and writing to complete, describes Chefalo’s dysfunctional upbringing and journey through the foster care system. She also offers insight into the problems and potential solutions surrounding...

Three years ago, federal Judge Shira Scheindlin declared the New York Police Department’s “stop and frisk” operations unconstitutional . An audit of these stops found that black and Latino New Yorkers were approached and patted down by police at a far higher rate than white New Yorkers, yet they rarely were found to be in illegal possession of guns or drugs. As a result, then-NYPD Commissioner Ray Kelly ordered the police force to wind down “stop and frisk” practices, which it did...

T he Saturday morning after St. Patrick’s Day, 22 patients are locked up in a nondescript detox facility on the outskirts of a Midwestern suburb. A couple of the men and women checked themselves in; a few more arrived in a police car; the rest were brought here by a worried friend, partner, or parent. A trio of volunteers from a local chapter of Alcoholics Anonymous has just arrived to hold a meeting. Those willing to join the circle recite the Serenity Prayer, listen to someone read "How it...

17-year-old Lew Blank was fiddling around with the Weldon Cooper Center’s Racial Dot Map when he discovered something disturbing about Wisconsin, where he lives: More than half of the African-American neighborhoods in the state are actually jails . Not only that, but the rest of the black neighborhoods across the state are either apartment complexes, Section 8 housing, or homeless shelters—the lone exception being a working-middle class section of Milwaukee. Sharing this info on the Young,...

“I am already dead! I have been buried.” said a young south Asian girl on the psychiatric ward. Prior to her admission she had stopped going to school, and instead isolated herself in her room spending hours on the internet searching for her grave. She was not eating much and losing weight. There had been occasions when she wandered off at night. With poor eye contact and slow speech, she added: “I can feel the worms crawling inside my body.” After an assessment she was found to have...

For years, Teri Barila had tried to coax newspaper reporters in Walla Walla, Washington , to write about brain science, ACEs, and resilience. They didn’t bite. Then, on a crisp December evening, 1600 people—many of them inspired by years of community organizing—crammed the town’s largest venue for a screening of Paper Tigers, James Redford’s documentary about the dramatic reboot of a local alternative school after its principal became an advocate of trauma-informed care. Suddenly, reporters...

Fifty-one years ago in the White House Rose Garden, former President Lyndon B. Johnson announced the launch of Head Start. “Five- and 6-year-old children are inheritors of poverty's curse and not its creators,” Johnson told his audience as he explained that the federal government would be, for the first time, funding education and health services for children living in poverty in the form of a public preschool program. That first summer, according to a press release from the time, the...

Contrary to popular belief, most people do care about the welfare of others. From an evolutionary standpoint, empathy is a valuable impulse that helps humans survive in groups. In American schools, this impulse has been lying dormant from a lack of focus. But in Denmark, a nation that has consistently been voted the happiest place in the world since Richard Nixon was president, children are taught about empathy from a young age both inside and outside of school. Children in the Danish school...

I was inspired to write the poem, "Freedom's Song of Sorrow", by the violent and tragic murders of black men in our nation following July 4th -- brutal murders of police, culminating with the violence in the world with the Bastille Day terrorist massacre in Nice, France. The poem actually began in the 1990's when I wrote the poem, "America's Children are Singing", inspired by Walt Whitman's poem, "I Hear America Singing", and my witnessing abuse and neglect of young children whom I cared for...