Blog

The potentially harmful effects of loneliness and social isolation on health and longevity, especially among older adults, are well established. For example, in 2013 I reported on research finding that loneliness can impair health by raising levels of stress hormones and inflammation, which in turn can increase the risk of heart disease, arthritis, Type 2 diabetes, dementia and even suicide attempts. Among older people who reported they felt left out, isolated or lacked companionship, the...

Spanking looks to be instantly effective. If a child is misbehaving—if he keeps swearing, or playing with matches—and then you spank that child, the behavior stops immediately. The effect is so apparently obvious that it can drive a sort of delusion. Lived experience tends to be more powerful than facts. One of the few memories that many people retain from early childhood is times they were spanked. The desire to believe it was “for our own good” is strong, if only because the alternative...

In September, after Donald Trump cancelled Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, the popular Obama-era program that granted legal protections to undocumented immigrants who had been brought to the U.S. as children, he told the program’s seven hundred thousand recipients, who then faced the prospect of being deported, that they had “ nothing to worry about .” His decision didn’t end the program right away—it gave Congress six months, until March, to negotiate a policy solution. Until then,...

"So people are not only baffled and alarmed by their symptoms; they are more often than not seeking-and getting-the wrong kind of help from people accustomed to using discussion, thinking, and language-help that often misfires. It’s not that talk therapy is bad. The emotional support of a sympathetic listener is as critically important as it ever was. It’s just that it’s not enough by itself.” Belleruth Naparstek, Invisible Heroes: Survivors of Trauma and How They Heal, 2004, pg. 13 Online...

"Over the last few years there has been a positive increase in the amount of awareness in our communities on understanding the impact of trauma, ACES and resilience. Training has become more frequent and accessible, but I have noticed that many people are still stuck on what to do next. What do I do with all of this knowledge? How do I actually change my response? What does being trauma informed actually look like in practice?" Melissa McGinn Our Becoming Trauma-Informed & Beyond...

More than 30 years after Congress established new mandatory minimums for illegal drugs with the Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1986 , it seems America's drug crisis has only gotten worse. A report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention published last month showed that the rate of death from overdose over the last quarter of 2016 in the United States had exploded to 20.6 per 100,000 people, topping the previous record of 19.1 per 100,000 people seen during the preceding quarter, and a...

These days, we as a society are talking and writing a lot about deaths related to addiction , and the drugs that fuel them . But we've been glacially slow to deal with this human tragedy because, I would suggest, of deep-seated, long-standing and widespread prejudice against addicts. Writers like physician Gabor Maté and British journalist Johan Hari have advanced cogent and essentially unassailable arguments for a better, more rational and humane – and effective – approach to drug...

Children of Carol Craig 's generation were commonly exposed to toxic stress – and that, she argues in her new book Hiding In Plain Sight, is a root cause of Scotland ’s ill health, drug and alcohol problems. Here, she examines the prevalence of emotional abuse in Scottish culture when she was growing up ... and how the effects are written in our national language SCOTS pride themselves on the country’s humour and music so it’s fitting that Billy Connolly is one of the nation’s favourite...

The Illinois Department of Children and Family Services is ending a high-profile program that used computer data mining to identify children at risk for serious injury or death after the agency's top official called the technology unreliable. "We are not doing the predictive analytics because it didn't seem to be predicting much," DCFS Director Beverly "B.J." Walker told the Tribune. The $366,000 Rapid Safety Feedback program was central to reforms promised by Walker's predecessor, George...

This story was produced in collaboration with Climate Central . David Ewing wears a bright white dust mask, his face behind it puffy and red, as he sits on a stone bench in downtown Santa Barbara, California. A fine layer of ash covers the pavement at his feet, dirty residue from wildfires ravaging the region. "When I woke up yesterday I couldn't breathe," says Ewing, who is homeless and has been diagnosed with cancer. He spent the previous night sleeping behind a Saks department store.

Let me ask you a question; take your time in answering it. Would you be willing to take health care away from a thousand children with the bad luck to have been born into low-income families so that you could give millions of extra dollars to just one wealthy heir? You might think that this question is silly, hypothetical and has an obvious answer. But it’s not at all hypothetical, and the answer apparently isn’t obvious. For it’s a literal description of the choice Republicans in Congress...

Rick Alleva is a field specialist at the University of New Hampshire and co-author of a curriculum called “ Courage to Care ,” which promotes empathy for middle schoolers. He has been researching and promoting positive youth development and the use of mindful learning as well as social and emotional learning (SEML) for many years. After graduating from Tufts University with a degree in psychology, he traveled cross-country, coming across many teenage runaways. That later heightened his...