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Jeffrey Pendleton was found dead in a jail cell in Manchester, New Hampshire, on March 13. His death can be chalked up to a number of issues: the paradox of overbearing yet negligent policing, America’s addiction to criminalizing the poor and homeless, the uninhabitable conditions of local jails , and how cities make bank from those paradoxes, bigotries and conditions. His death also illuminates how the ridiculously paltry wages inside the food-service sector leave its workers vulnerable to...

Say you have a problem child. If it’s a toddler, maybe he smacks his siblings. Or she refuses to put on her shoes as the clock ticks down to your morning meeting at work. If it’s a teenager, maybe he peppers you with obscenities during your all-too-frequent arguments. The answer is to punish them, right? Not so, says Alan Kazdin, director of the Yale Parenting Center. Punishment might make you feel better, but it won’t change the kid’s behavior. Instead, he advocates for a radical technique...

Last week, the New York City Council passed a number of changes to the city's zoning code, including a mandatory inclusionary housing provision that will require new private housing developments built in the city to permanently include units for low-income renters. The changes were proposed by Mayor Bill de Blasio as part of his administration's affordable housing initiative, and are intended to ease the city's affordable housing crisis. The administration describes the housing plan as "a...

Mike Lamb, Washington, DC Executive Director of Turnaround for Children , alerted me to this interesting Cover Story in The Christian Science Monitor about how Scott Gordon, chief executive officer of Mastery Charter Schools comprised of 21 charter schools in Philadelphia, has shifted his “no excuses” approach to a “trauma-informed” approach to discipline. The article by Sarah Garland reports: Classrooms and hallways are still orderly, but suspension is now a last resort. Mastery instead...

About 406,000 Texans with mental illness and substance abuse disorders could have health insurance if the state expanded Medicaid, according to a new report from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Monday. Texas is one of 20 states that have not expanded Medicaid coverage, opting out of many provisions of the Affordable Care Act. “Today’s report shows that Medicaid expansion is an important step Texas can take to address behavioral health needs, including serious mental illness...

Amanda Hensley started abusing prescription painkillers when she was just a teenager. For years, she managed to function and hold down jobs. She even quit opioids for a while when she was pregnant with her now 4-year-old son. But she relapsed. Hensley says she preferred drugs like Percocet and morphine, but opted for heroin when she was short on cash. By the time she discovered she was pregnant last year, she couldn't quit. "It was just one thing after another, you know — I was sick with...

How do you fix a problem if you don't know its size? Many states — including some that have been hardest hit by the opioid crisis — don't know how many of their youngest residents each year are born physically dependent on those drugs. They rely on estimates. Pennsylvania is one of those states. Ted Dallas , head of Pennsylvania's Department of Human Services, calls the information he's working with "reasonably good." "Data is never pristine when you're dealing with 2.7 million people," he...

“What are you hiding?” the elder asked Rose Domnick. It was a simple question in response to Domenic’s request for help overcoming her mysteriously growing, incapacitating fear. But Domenic was stunned by the query and involuntarily blurted out that she had been sexually abused repeatedly as a child. Now in her 50s, she had told no one except a visiting Catholic priest who’d come to her Yup’ik village church many years ago. “When I was 11 years old, I told this priest about the abuse...

The authorities have released pictures of men implicated in the Brussels bombings, one of brusswhom is thought to be still at large. But does the current media analysis mislead as to who is ultimately responsible? A new study, recently published by Sofia Pinero Kluch from the Gallup public opinion research company, based in Washington, DC, and Alan Vaux, a psychologist at Southern Illinois University, USA, has uncovered some novel and even shocking findings, in a survey of attitudes to...

Near the front door of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation hangs a quilt that tells the stories of several lives—stories of love, spirit, and joy—tragically cut short because of HIV/AIDS. Every six months for the past 14 years, we have had the privilege of displaying a different section of the AIDS Memorial Quilt at our headquarters, and the profound honor of getting to know these individuals through the moving patchworks created by their loved ones. Every time a new section arrives, I stop...

In my writings and videos I often write and speak about mindfulness. In talking about mindfulness I emphasize the present moment, yet I am aware of how our past and our future work together. The definition of mindfulness instructs us to live in the present moment, nonjudgmentally. “Nonjudgmentally” means we need not put a value judgment on the present moment. We are simply to experience the moment. The minute that we think this is a good moment or a bad moment, we have judged the moment. The...

A couple posts ago, I wrote about a neat and very effective new tactic I just learned for healing stress . Oddly, I learned about this technique, called “completing the cycle,” in a book called “ Come As You Are: the Surprising New Science That Will Transform Your Sex Life ” by Dr. Emily Nagoski. As I’ve kept reading, I’ve kept learning more surprising new things. In fact, I just finished a section that describes how our ancient reptilian limbic brains prefer to deal with stress. I have...