February 2019

When county departments presented their budget needs to commissioners, Library Director Trina Rushing asked for a position one may not associate with a library. It’s a position, however, that would help county residents in need connect to services that could make a difference in their lives: a social worker. A wide swath of the community comes through the library’s doors every day, Rushing said, and many of them have a variety of needs. They could be homeless looking for basic needs like...

When you first hear about it, it sounds unlikely, fact that something that happened to someone in utero, at the age of two months, or four years, or any time in childhood, is what is killing them as an adult, or making them want to die, or making them want to hurt themselves or others. Yet the connection between childhood trauma and adult disease, mental illness, addiction, suicide, violence – most all of society’s ills – is as irrefutable as the myriad truths revealed about it in the...