Blog

Berkeley, California, is a small city facing some large-scale challenges. There are the environmental: the Hayward fault line runs straight through the city, and the California drought and the impending effects of sea level rise on the San Francisco Bay pose threats of fires and floods. And there are the social: despite its progressive history, socioeconomic and racial inequity persist in Berkeley, and have only been exacerbated by the regional tech boom. These are not isolated challenges,...

Two years ago, the president of Credit Management Services, a collection agency in Grand Island, Nebraska, presented a struggling local family with the keys to a used 2007 Mercury Grand Marquis. To commemorate the donation, the company held a ceremony that concluded outside its offices, where the couple and their two young girls could try out their new car. The family’s story was dire: Their 8-year-old daughter’s failing kidney had led to multiple surgeries and a deluge of medical bills,...

More than 70 million Americans have some kind of criminal record. For them, and the 600,000 Americans released from state and federal prisons each year, having served time can often mean that the cornerstones of the reintegration process—securing a job and housing—become exceedingly difficult tasks. Last week, President Obama signed a memorandum proposing a rule that would prohibit federal agencies from asking whether applicants for government jobs have a criminal record until the final...

The U.S. Supreme Court will not consider a case from Native American inmates in Alabama prisons who want to wear their hair long in accordance with their religious beliefs and tradition. The justices’ refusal to hear their appeal lets stand an appeals-court decision from last summer that ruled in favor of the Alabama Department of Corrections and its grooming policies, which require male inmates to keep their hair short, defined as “off neck and ears.” The Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals...

When the new subdivisions were rising everywhere here in the 1990s and early 2000s, with hundreds and hundreds of fine homes on one-acre lots carved out of the Georgia forest, the price divide between this part of De­Kalb County and the northern part wasn’t so vast. Now, a house that looks otherwise identical in South DeKalb, on the edge of Atlanta, might sell for half what it would in North DeKalb. The difference has widened over the years of the housing boom, bust and recovery, and Wayne...

The last two decades have given rise to a body of research establishing that young adults are fundamentally different from both juveniles and older adults in how they process information and make decisions. The prefrontal cortex of the brain — responsible for our cognitive processing and impulse control — does not fully develop until the early to mid-20s. At the same time that young adults are going through this critical developmental phase, many find themselves facing adulthood without...

Earlier this month, police received a frantic phone call from the parents of Melissa Boarts . Their daughter had just threatened to slit her wrists, they explained to the police, and had then promptly driven off. Police allege that, when they caught up with Boarts, who was diagnosed with bipolar manic depression, she got out of her car, “armed with a weapon and charged the officers.” Officers shot and killed her. In the wake of their daughter’s death, Boarts’ parents have been adamant about...

Until Ken Luce began working with his father, Tom, on the Okay to Say advertising campaign to destigmatize mental illness, he didn’t know his grandmother had suffered from paranoid schizophrenia. “I’m sure it had been mentioned,” says Ken, 55, and owner of LDWWgroup , a Dallas marketing firm, “but not in the context we’re talking about. I knew her as my grandmother.” He was 3 when the elder Luce, after years of hoping his mother would get better on her own, made the excruciating decision to...

Hoping to keep your mental edge as you get older? Look after your heart, a recent analysis suggests, and your brain will benefit, too. A research team led by Hannah Gardener , an epidemiologist at the University of Miami, analyzed a subset of data from the Northern Manhattan Study , a large, ongoing study of risk factors for stroke among whites, blacks and Hispanics living in the Washington Heights neighborhood of New York City. The scientists wanted to see how people in their 60s and 70s...

Health care workers are scrambling to help the people here cope with what many fear will be chronic consequences of the city’s water contamination crisis: profound stress, worry, depression and guilt. Uncertainty about their own health and the health of their children, the open-ended nature of the crisis, and raw anger over government’s role in both causing the lead contamination and trying to remedy it, are all taking their toll on Flint’s residents. “The first thing I noticed when I got to...

Many people experience trauma, but few — and that includes medical professionals — understand the larger impact it can have on their lives and the lives of others. Ryan Van Wyk, a psychologist at Park Nicollet Melrose Center , wants to change that. He believes that past trauma lies at the root of many common mental health and addiction issues, and if more people understood that fact and worked to heal trauma, many could live happier, healthier lives. “My graduate school was great,” Van Wyk...

The history of many young New Mexicans who ended up in juvenile detention shows a brutal betrayal of their innocence and youth. According to a recent groundbreaking study, the amount of trauma some of these New Mexico juvenile offenders experienced – when compared to their peers across the country – was “off the charts.” Many were victims of neglect, abandonment, beatings or rape, and were exposed to family violence, mental illness, drug abuse and more. They had patterns of early childhood...