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Big Data has transformed everything from sports to politics to education. It could transform mental-health treatment, too—if only psychologists would stop ignoring it. Grace was a heroin addict who had been clean for about six months; I was a 34-year-old therapist in training. When we started psychotherapy, in 2006, Grace had a lot going against her. She was an unemployed single mother who had been in a string of relationships with violent men and was addicted to drugs. Yet despite these...

When Ameen Al-Dalli was a sophomore in high school in 2014, each weekday before sunrise he would walk the quiet, tree-lined streets of Fairfax, Virginia, to the school bus stop. Because Ameen’s public school, about five miles away, started at 7:20 a.m., the bus came early. “I feel drowsy and just like, ugh, I want to go home,” he told National Geographic filmmakers during his walk in the gloom. This wasn’t always the case for high schoolers. A few generations ago, the bell rang around 9 a.m.

Substance abuse exacts a heavy toll on the American workplace, a new analysis shows. Employees who struggle with drinking and drug addiction miss many more days of work, have higher health care costs and are less productive than those without these disorders, researchers report. An analysis revealed that employees with substance use disorders miss nearly 50 percent more work days than their colleagues, and up to six weeks of work a year, according to the National Safety Council, NORC at the...

Life prospects appeared bleak for 17-year-old Terrance Williams on a quiet Saturday in the spring of 2013. He was facing years in prison on charges of armed burglary. This was just the latest setback in a rough and tumble Philadelphia childhood that had taught him that the only way to make a living was by hustle and crime. Then Terrance noticed a bit of ruckus coming down the hallway of the Philadelphia jailhouse where he awaited his day in court. Someone was shouting that people should get...

It was October 2012. I had been invited to give a lecture on secondhand drinking (the negative impacts of a person's drinking behaviors on others) to Stanford Medical School students enrolled in Dr. Stanley Fischman's Eating Disorders and Addiction Rotation. Dr. Fischman asked me to speak with his rotation students on a regular basis given my decades experience with loved ones' alcohol misuse, my own eating disorders, and my relevant work experience. He wanted his students to understand the...

When Echo first announced the theme for this year’s conference – Social & Historical Trauma – some were worried about whether we could pull off an event built around such a difficult and sensitive topic. Yet we felt we had to tackle this subject since every year at our childhood trauma conference participants always raise the questions, “What about racism? What about community trauma and poverty? How do these things contribute to Adverse Childhood Experiences?” Kanwarpal Dhaliwal from...

College is unaffordable for a lot of families. That’s widely acknowledged across party lines. But a new report shows that as many as 95 percent of colleges are completely unaffordable—and thus unavailable—for huge swaths of Americans. For many would-be college students, their choices are delimited by their socioeconomic status before they have even taken the SAT. In a new report, the nonprofit Institute for Higher Education Policy (IHEP) tackles those issues—and the numbers aren’t good:...

After-school programs are on the chopping block in the Trump administration’s proposed budget, an issue a reporter drew attention to at a recent press conference with the director of the Office of Management and Budget, Mick Mulvaney. In response to a question about the future of these programs , Mulvaney said, “They’re supposed to be educational programs, right? And that’s what they’re supposed to do … There’s no demonstrable evidence they’re helping results, helping kids do better in...

Donald Trump in America, Rob Ford in Canada, Brexit in the U.K., and (maybe) Marine Le Pen in France— as I wrote on Tuesday , populism is tied to a cultural backlash reinforced by our increasingly uneven geography. These growing divides generate the anger and backlash that translates into backward-looking, reactionary populist politics. The economic strategies of populists are territorial: walls, immigration restrictions, and rules based on national origin. But populism’s rise in Europe as...

It was during my second pregnancy when the changes really hit me. I had recently moved to the East Los Angeles neighborhood of Boyle Heights. This is where I now work as a perinatal case manager for Maternal and Child Health Access and where most of my clients live, but at the time I was unemployed. During the pregnancy, I noticed my anxiety and depression growing so strong they almost knocked me over. I was training to be a mental health specialist and had been looking for a job for two...

When Joseph and Eva Rogers moved to Milwaukee from Arkansas in 1969, there was no better city for African-American workers to find employment. Neither had made it past grade school, but Joe found a job on the bottle line at Graf Beverages, known for root beer, and Eva worked at a rag factory. They were part of what turned out to be the last chapter of the Great Migration, in which 6 million Southern laborers moved north for a better life, and reshaped the nation. [For more of this story,...

Americans paid more than $6.6 billion over eight years to care for victims of gun violence, according to a new tally of hospital bills. And U.S. taxpayers picked up at least 41% of that tab. That’s just the tip of the iceberg, say the authors of a study published this week in the American Journal of Public Health. Their sum does not include the initial — and very costly — bill for gunshot victims’ care in emergency rooms. Nor does it include hospital readmissions to treat complications or...