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Elisheva Adler was 20 years old, sitting in pajamas in her childhood bedroom in Long Island, the first time she saved someone's life via text message. Adler had just started volunteering as a counselor for Crisis Text Line. The 4-year-old nonprofit provides free crisis intervention through a medium that is increasingly favored by young people: texts. Using the code 741741, counselors have exchanged more than 50 million messages with people who are facing issues from stress at school to...

Join me for a 6 week digital discussion group about Dr. Brené Brown's newest book, Braving the Wilderness: The Quest for True Belonging and the Courage to Stand Alone . If you're like me, you've been inspired by Brené Brown's work. As I read Brené's work I often find myself wanting to share what I'm learning with others, dive deeper into my own understandings, and process what I'm thinking and feeling. I hope this discussion group can provide that space for you! Each week we will cover...

A young man walks onto an empty stage. The spotlight glares off of his white moccasins and crisp long-sleeved button-down, which billows, untucked, over dark slacks. He cuts a slight figure against the venue’s deep, black backdrop, and his clean-shaven face, framed by two long black braids, makes him look younger than his 27 years. He speaks softly into the microphone, first in his native Lakota, then in English: “Hello, relatives. My Lakota name is Walks With Young People. I also go by...

Background Trauma and adverse childhood experiences (ACE) occur more often in mental illness, including psychosis, than in the general population. Individuals with psychosis (cases) report a higher number and severity (dose) of adversities than healthy controls. While a dose-dependent increase of adversities has been related to more severe psychopathology, the role of type and timing is still insufficiently understood on the exacerbation of positive and negative psychotic symptoms. Moreover,...

Before scores of professional athletes brought black Americans' thorny relationship with love of country center stage, did you know that, in 2014, a black girl in Texas had started her own protest ritual of sitting during the Pledge of Allegiance? Much like how today's athletes are citing racial injustice as reasoning to exercise their First Amendment rights, the Houston senior, who has declined to be named, recently stated the following: "We live in a country where there isn't justice and...

Tucked between Pennsylvania and West Virginia on the far western edge of Maryland’s panhandle, rural Garrett County (population 29,460) is a study in contrasts. Driving along one of its few main roads on a cool summer day, one passes fast-food restaurants and aging strip malls, small family farms, a big box store. Then a valley opens up on either side, bathed in Appalachia’s green beauty. Up at Deep Creek Lake, in the heart of the county, multimillion-dollar homes and fast-multiplying condos...

Imagine heading out to run errands at all your usual places, and your phone’s “equity app” has a better idea. Siri might say: “Buy your groceries at one of these other stores, just as close as your regular store.” Or: “There are three coffee shops within 2 miles. You haven’t tried this one before.” We already get shopping suggestions when we bring up Google Maps, especially when our smartphones are transmitting our GPS coordinates. A similar type of computation is happening behind the scenes...

The American Psychological Association (APA) just issued guidelines for treating trauma . Patients and therapists would be wise to ignore them. The guidelines are supposed to reflect the best scientific evidence. In fact, they ignore all scientific evidence except one kind of study, called randomized controlled trials (RCTs). RCTs randomly assign people to treatment or control groups. They can answer certain questions (Is a medication more effective than a sugar pill ?) and not others (How...

Thanksgiving celebrates the fundamental American ideal of diverse groups coming together as part of a singular nation. But with the Trump administration’s harsh rhetoric on immigration, that ideal feels like it is increasingly under threat. Trump’s anti-immigrant stance not only violates American values; it goes against basic economic logic. It’s well-established that highly skilled and highly educated immigrants make up an outsized share of America’s science and technology workforce,...

In the basement of Casa Ruby in Washington, D.C., transgender men and women in their late teens and 20s, mostly brown or black, shared snacks, watched TV, chatted or played games on their phones. Many of them, said Corado, are part of the 31 percent. That's 31 percent of transgender Americans who lack regular access to health care. The finding comes from a new poll by NPR, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. Corado pointed to one crucial word...

Is suffering a necessary part of the human condition? Is it species normal for individuals to feel anxious—like impending doom, a fear of intimacy, or a sense of falseness and meaninglessness? John Firman and Ann Gila, following the psychosynthesis tradition of Roberto Assagioli (1973), say no, this is not part of being human. The “anxious estrangement” that most people today feel is not normal but unnatural (The Primal Wound, 1997, p. 2). It is the result of a violation in early life that...

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