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Please check out this new policy brief from the National Prevention Science Coalition. Hopefully a valuable resource for many of us out there!

Before the gold standard in HIV treatment—called HAART, for “highly active antiretroviral therapy”—came along in the mid-90s, untreated people could expect to live about 10 years after they were infected by HIV. HAART, a combination of several HIV drugs, transformed HIV from a death sentence to a chronic, survivable condition, prolonging life by several decades. Within two years of becoming available, it lowered HIV mortality rates by 80 percent. A New York Times story from 2001 describes...

year ago, Penelope sat alone in her darkened bedroom, numbed out on drugs. It was her junior year in high school. She’d quit the volleyball club after showing up high too many times. Her grades were mostly Cs and Ds. College seemed out of reach. And rehab? She tried that, for four months, but when she got out, she surrendered to the pressure to use again. “I was just really unhappy unless I was high,” she recalls. Today, Penelope (whose name has been changed to protect her privacy) is a...

Over the last two decades, America has become increasingly polarized by both class and geography. As the middle class and its neighborhoods have declined, our nation has increasingly divided into rich and poor, and neighborhoods of concentrated affluence have become surrounded by larger spans of concentrated disadvantage. This pattern is both reflected and reinforced by housing prices. An analysis released today by the real estate company Trulia finds considerable overlap between racial...

As the resistance to President Donald Trump’s regime begins to organize and distinguish itself from the Democratic Party, it faces a question of tactics. Marches can be energizing, especially for newcomers, but when they don’t lead anywhere (in a larger sense), they can turn dispiriting. Property destruction — anarchists sometimes jokingly call it “smashy smashy” — gets media attention and can shut down a fascist recruiting party, but broken glass and fire sometimes scare the wrong people...

A harsh light is cast these days on what divides us. But Americans fundamentally agree on many things. Perhaps first and foremost: that all of our kids deserve a shot at achieving the American Dream. Two organizations not known for shared ideology — the conservative American Enterprise Institute and the progressive Brookings Institution — recently laid out a blueprint for action to make sure that the opportunity to succeed is not just a dream for some but a reality for all. It's called...

A few months ago, not long after I announced that 2017 would be the year I would step down as president and CEO of this remarkable organization, I experienced a deeply moving and defining moment. It happened during our annual Culture of Health Prize celebration, when the Foundation honors the men and women of communities across the nation who are working to make their towns, their tribes, their cities, and their neighborhoods as healthy as they can be. These are people who are passionate...

In Albany, trauma-informed policy change means working from the top down as well as the bottom up. After years of advocacy from HEARTS (Healthy Environments and Relationships That Support), along with trainings for the state’s Department of Health conducted by one of the network’s leaders, New York agreed in December 2015 to add questions about ACEs to its Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System (BRFSS) survey. “That’s huge, because policy-makers look at that data and use it to make...

The Iowa ACEs Policy Coalition continued its legislative advocacy this week at the Iowa Capitol. As elected officials shift their focus to the appropriations process, advocates emphasized the importance of two key priorities that will be addressed through funding legislation: Statewide expansion of the 1st Five Healthy Development Initiative Advancement of the Mental Health Workgroup's recommendations More than 25 advocates joined small group meetings with key legislative leaders on these...

A scientist at Harvard Medical School planned to keep on collaborating with Iranian academics on HIV/AIDS research. Scholars at Columbia Law School’s human rights clinic wanted to study the impact of armed conflict on the mental health of people in Yemen, a country in the midst of a deadly civil war . And thousands of students from Muslim-majority countries hoped to attend American universities. When President Donald Trump signed a temporary ban on travel from seven countries in January, all...

The Hogg Foundation for Mental Health invites eligible organizations in Texas to respond to this request for proposals (RFP) to identify and build on resources that improve academic achievement through mental health. The goals of this initiative are to improve academic achievement and mental wellness in educational settings through culturally and linguistically appropriate mental health supports and interventions. Depending on the quality of proposals received, the foundation plans to award...

Of the men and women completing a survey of mental health issues in rural Scotland 67 per cent reported suffering depression, 22 per cent admitted to suicidal thoughts and feelings, while of the 12 per cent describing self-harming behaviour the majority were under 24 years old. These were some of the preliminary findings described to this week's meetings of the National Rural Mental Health Forum, and the Scottish Parliament 's Cross Party Group on Rural Policy, by Professor Sarah Skerratt...