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Advocates in Washington state are cheering the recent passage of a newly signed bill that aims to bolster the state’s efforts to divert youth from the juvenile justice system by broadening the types of cases eligible for diversion and strengthening the network of community-based service providers. A major aim of Senate Bill 6550 is to ensure Washington’s kids can receive supportive services closer to home, which has been shown to decrease recidivism in juvenile offenders. It also provides...

Mortality rates and trends in the United States due to drug use disorders have increased nationally since 1980, and while rates due to alcohol use disorders and self-harm have decreased, they are on an upward trend since 2000. These rates, including those due to interpersonal violence, also vary drastically in terms of geography, down to the county level, according to an analysis of data from 1980 to 2014. The analysis, led by Laura Dwyer-Lindgren, PhD, an assistant professor at the...

A dose of reality has moved two influential food gurus to reassess their preaching and write self-help memoirs on their lifelong meditative journeys. In striking contrast to their previous best-selling books — Geneen Roth's Women Food and God and Ed Espe Brown's Tassajara Bread Book — these slim, kindred volumes of accumulated wisdom contain no definitive answers, no foolproof recipes for improving your relationship with food and yourself. There is no recipe, agree Roth and Brown. (In fact,...

For months, Rural Opportunity Institute co-founders Seth Saeugling and Vichi Jagannathan have gathered Tarboro community members , interviewed families and leaders, and analyzed research around intergenerational trauma in a Pattillo Middle School office. “Where we’re headed is to really identify where is the leverage?” Saeugling said. “What’s the North Star and how can we all start rowing in the same direction when it comes to trauma and trying to provide healing opportunities?” On Tuesday,...

CHICAGO—Americans hear a lot these days about the country’s urban-rural divide. Rural counties are poorer; urban ones richer. Rural areas are losing jobs; urban ones are gaining them. People with a college education are leaving rural areas. They’re moving to urban places. Behind this divergence lies a straightforward story: The twin forces of globalization and technological change are enriching a handful of big urban areas, while resources are drained from the heartland, leaving it often...

I stand at the door on my way to school, tears rolling down my face. A long skirt grazes my small, thin legs; a knot clenches in my stomach. It’s the first day of school, maybe second or third grade. Every year, my family insists I wear a dress or skirt to school on the first day, presenting myself as the proper female student. I am not. What I didn’t know then — and what I am just now starting to explore — is that my discomfort on those first days of school was about more than just clothes.

It has been proposed that drug related deaths in Scotland, which have been rising since the 1990s, can be attributed to the social, economic and political contexts of the 1980s. Findings from research published today in BMC Public Health add support to this idea and here, lead author of the study Dr Jane Parkinson, discusses the delayed consequences that policies and resulting social conditions have on health and what current drug policy in Scotland can do to support this generation. 2016...

Tony McGuire- a member of Community Resilience Initiative in Walla Walla Washington, and an instructor for Walla Walla Community College at the Washington State Penitentiary- had divided his Building Maintenance class into random groups where white supremacists may be working on the same team as Native Americans. This choice was intentional; “there’s no affiliation on a job site, so you don’t get that here,” Tony told his students. Yet not long after the start of such teamwork, tools began...

People often ask me why I wrote # ChildhoodDisrupted . As a science journalist specializing in the intersection of neurobiology, immunology and emotion, I’d spent 20 years writing about the immune system and the human brain. When I came across the CDC’s # ACE Study (Adverse Childhood Experiences Study), it struck me like a lightning bolt. I realized that after 20 years of writing about how we become ill and how we heal, I had been missing a huge piece of what can cause disease. Chronic...

Note: I spotted this article published as part of Longreads, an excellent site that publishes long form journalism, and thought I'd share it with this community. The young people who experienced the Parkland shooting are turning their grief and terror into powerful activism, and for that we're all grateful. That said, they need and deserve - as all survivors do - help with their post traumatic stress, now and for years to come. 'm also concerned about how the need to tell and retell their...

Adverse Childhood research has been around for a while but recently it has moved front and center in the conversation on childhood trauma. Thanks to people like Dr. Robert Anda co-principal investigator of the Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACE) research and Oprah Winfrey, adverse childhood experiences as a direct cause of developmental and health problems later in life, are getting the attention that they deserve. As someone who works with relational trauma, I deal with the effects of these...