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As a teacher and teacher-educator for more than a decade, I have had the privilege of working with thousands of educators. Now, in my current capacity as the director of education at the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence , part of my job is supporting educators from all over the nation in learning, living, and teaching social and emotional learning (SEL), a set of life skills that support people in experiencing, managing, and expressing their emotions effectively and in fostering...

This post contains some spoilers for the first season of Big Little Lies. HBO’s recently wrapped miniseries Big Little Lies is a whodunit featuring attractive people grimly swirling wine and glaring at roiling surf from deck parapets. The adjective “soapy” frequently worms its way into reviews that unfairly boil the show down to its least compelling elements. The Wireit is not, but Big Little Lies isn’t unserious just because it portrays denizens of a tax bracket few viewers can sniff. [For...

This post is part of a CityLab series on o pen secrets —stories about what’s hiding in plain sight. Despite recent progress, South Carolina still has a domestic violence problem. [See the whole post here: https://www.citylab.com/politics/2017/04/no-one-really-wants-to-talk-about-it/523554/]

Who should you partner with to create lasting change through resilience in your community? The Building Community Resilience (BCR) initiative aims to address, prevent, and reduce the effects of adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) and adverse community environments (ACEs) on children’s health and wellbeing ( The “Pair of ACEs” ). An essential element of the successes of BCR’s five test sites around the country has been strategic collaborations. In your work to build resilience, identifying...

Here's yet another reason to make sure your kids are active: New research shows those with stronger muscles may have better working memory. Evaluating 79 children between the ages of 9 and 11, scientists said they found that muscle fitness was directly related to a more accurate memory. The results also reinforced established research linking kids' aerobic fitness to better thinking skills and academic performance. "There are multiple ways children can derive benefit from exercise ... to...

Teens and young adults who come from troubled backgrounds have a greater risk of killing themselves, a new study suggests. Kids exposed to suicide in the family, parental mental health disorders and substantial parental criminal behavior had the highest suicide rates, the study found. The findings "emphasize the importance of understanding the social mechanisms of suicide and the need for effective interventions early in life aimed at alleviating the suicide risk in disadvantaged children,"...

You probably haven’t heard of the winner of this year’s UNESCO Peace Prize. In the past, the award, officially called the Félix Houphouët-Boigny Prize, has been granted to internationally renowned figures including Nelson Mandela, Yasser Arafat, and Shimon Peres. This year, for the first time ever, the award goes to a mayor: 56-year-old Giusi Nicolini, mayor of a small Italian island that’s home to about 6,000 people. The island in question is Lampedusa , a small islet roughly equidistant...

You saw the pictures in science class—a profile view of the human brain, sectioned by function. The piece at the very front, right behind where a forehead would be if the brain were actually in someone’s head, is the pre-frontal cortex. It handles problem-solving, goal-setting, and task execution. And it works with the limbic system, which is connected and sits closer to the center of the brain. The limbic system processes emotions and triggers emotional responses, in part because of its...

As the United States faces a worsening opioid drug crisis, health experts offered an overview of the epidemic, explored the rise in toxic drug combinations, and suggested new ways of approaching the story in a webinar hosted by the Center for Health Journalism this week. “We are in the midst of a severe epidemic that’s fueling record high levels of opioid overdose deaths,” said Dr. Andrew Kolodny , the co-director of Opioid Policy Research at the Heller School for Social Policy and...

The Five Year Mental Health Youth Report presented findings from the past five Mission Australia youth surveys, during which thousands of adolescents answered questions on several topics, including mental health. The report found that there are more people in the 15-to-19 age category in psychological distress than there were five years ago. It also found girls were "twice as likely as boys to meet the criteria for having a probable serious mental illness", and almost a third of Aboriginal...

Kate was labelled as ‘mentally ill’ since she was a kid. She despised this label. It meant that something was wrong with her. At the age of 17, she was finally diagnosed with ‘Schizophrenia’ when her condition was getting worse. Schizophrenia is a debilitating mental condition. It can hamper people’s interaction with reality itself. But with Kate’s natural propensity towards art, it only amplified the way she drew and painted things. And like any natural artist, she took the mental condition...

There’s a lot of debate about which form of therapy is the most psychologically effective, the most cost-effective, the quickest working and the longest lasting. They all have their benefits and drawbacks, depending on the individual and the kind of mental health problem he or she is dealing with. A new study reports that an eight-week course of group mindfulness training has a similar efficacy to usual care—in the this case, cognitive behavior therapy (CBT), which in recent years has been...