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On August 8, President Trump spoke to the opioid crisis in this country and declined to declare a national emergency as recommended by the “President’s Commission on Combating Drug Addiction and the Opioid Crisis.” Instead, the President emphasized the law and order aspects of the problem and the importance of preventing drug use in the first place since addiction is so hard to overcome. The Commission will make a final report in the fall. The recently released interim report makes eight...

The story of Wilkinsburg, Pennsylvania, is the story of how a small black city fights from vanishing, or rather, from being vanished away, and the black women who were recently installed to lead that fight. In May, Marita Garrett was elected the first black woman to serve as mayor for the Borough of Wilkinsburg , which sits on the eastern border of Pittsburgh in the Big Tech-centric city’s shadows. The Wilkinsburg she is inheriting is one that, like a lot of small municipalities, is fighting...

The Concrn app debuted in San Francisco. Experts see some benefits to the new product but say more needs to be done to make it effective. Seeing a homeless person can be a common occurrence when walking down a city street, but knowing the best way to help someone isn’t always easy. Many passersby concerned about someone might dial 911, but a new app is offering an alternative. Concrn allows users to report a homeless person who needs assistance. In these cases, a trained community member...

In a new study of video games, researchers found that the hippocampal system of the brain is influenced by the navigation strategy that a person employs as well as the genre of the game. The hippocampus is the brain region associated with spatial learning, navigation, and memory and is critical to healthy cognition. The more depleted the hippocampus becomes, the more a person is at risk of developing brain illnesses and diseases ranging from depression to schizophrenia , PTSD and Alzheimer’s...

After 9/11, I was asked by the Baltimore City Health Commissioner to help prepare the city for a radiation terrorism event, because my entire career up until that point had been in radiation-based medical imaging. I didn’t know anything about public health preparedness at the time, but I found it very fulfilling to work with the city health department and other first responders, especially fire and police. Public health preparedness science and research is more than multi-disciplinary, it’s...

Steady improvements in American life expectancy have stalled, and more Americans are dying younger. But for companies straining under the burden of their pension obligations, the distressing trend could have a grim upside: If people don’t end up living as long as they were projected to just a few years ago, their employers ultimately won’t have to pay them as much in pension and other lifelong retirement benefits. [For more of this story, written by John Tozzi, go to ...

Lead author, psychiatrist Daniel G. Amen, MD, founder of Amen Clinics, Inc., commented, "This is a very important study to help understand gender-based brain differences. The quantifiable differences we identified between men and women are important for understanding gender-based risk for brain disorders such as Alzheimer's disease. Using functional neuroimaging tools, such as SPECT, are essential to developing precision medicine brain treatments in the future." The brains of women in the...

America is in the grip of a massive health crisis that has nothing to do with Washington. With one simple question, we could unlock the surprising underlying issues that lead to some of our greatest public health issues. In any public space, a lot of us look around and see obesity and lifestyle diseases everywhere. Whether we see an extremely obese person or an extremely underweight person, it’s easy to make a quick judgment. How did he get to be so huge? Does she not know how to eat? Our...

I want to share a video of three women who survived childhood sexual abuse. Rythea Lee brought me and Aishah Shahidah Simmons into her 19 th Episode of Advice from a Loving Bitch. What a privilege and delight to be included in Rythea's groundbreaking work. We all spoke to the same questions about healing and activism. The experience was a great one for me – to join with two sister survivors in breaking the silence. The months long process of making the video was a lesson in collaborative...

After the 2014 Vermont legislative session, Rep. George Till was picking himself up, dusting himself off and reflecting on what he called an “ALE or Adverse Legislative Experience” when his ambitious legislative vision fizzled and became a tiny bubble of hope along the path to a trauma-informed state. Policymakers in Vermont are now preparing to implement the most recent ACEs-related legislation ( No. 43, H. 508 , signed by Republican Gov. Phil Scott on May 22) and while the law calls for...

Together with the staff, they decided that handing out awards neither aligned with their beliefs nor brought out the best in their students—even for the sliver of kids who received awards. “Winners” got the message that product rather than process is what matters in education, Wejr said. “Learning should be the reward,” he added. And the far more plentiful “losers” heard that they weren’t good enough to be spotlighted on stage, or that their unique combination of attributes didn’t truly...

Despite an ongoing national movement toward banning solitary confinement for youth, which has been revealed to be counterproductive and harmful, isolation is still a common fixture in juvenile facilities, and it disproportionately affects kids of color and LGBTQ youth, according to research laid out in a Juvenile Law Center (JLC) report . JLC is a public interest law firm focused on improving the juvenile and foster care systems. The report, released Wednesday, includes information from...