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You’re 16, homeless and sleeping on a park bench when police grab you at 3 in the morning. Vagrancy, trespassing or a host of minor offenses send you tumbling into the juvenile justice system. Or you’re 16, do something stupid with marijuana, get caught trespassing, missing curfews or skipping school. You have a home but no true family support system, and suddenly, with a criminal record, nobody’s hiring, school expelled you and your family tossed you out of the house. You too wind up...

In his book, The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma, author Bessel van der Kolk describes what makes the most difference in determining those children and eventually those adults who perpetuate self-destructive behaviors. This means while they continue to experience suicidal thoughts and behaviors that are self-injurious, they can be healed through therapy, so they no longer pursue self-harming behaviors. Most parents have heard about children and...

As downward spirals go, Mark’s was early and precipitous. He first tried alcohol at 13, began binge drinking shortly afterward, and graduated to pot, Percocet, then heroin. When he was 22, snorting drugs alone in a cheap motel room, he passed out on the floor, where he lay for hours in a position that cut off circulation to his right leg. It had to be amputated above the knee. While recovering in the hospital Mark had unfettered access to opiates, in severe pain but almost enjoying the...

Nearly one in four American adults under the age of 65 has medical debt, according to the results of a new study by the Urban Institute, and southerners are hit hardest by past-due doctors’ bills. The study authors, Michael Karpman and Kyle J. Caswell, found that eight of the ten states with the highest rates of past-due medical debt were in the South: Mississippi, Arkansas, West Virginia, South Carolina, Kentucky, Oklahoma, Alabama, and Georgia. The rate was lowest in Hawaii, at 6 percent...

Brandy Ramos’ 9-year-old daughter has spent the school year learning about adding decimals and the difference between cold-blooded and warm-blooded animals. So earlier this month, Ramos was shocked when she picked up her daughter from school and the third-grader asked her to explain a sex act. The same day, her 11-year-old son, who’s in sixth-grade, asked her about another sex act. The children’s questions came after they were given a survey at school. A group of parents — including Ramos —...

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: Starting in the 1970s, U.S. policymakers embraced draconian criminal-justice policies as part of the war on drugs. Tough-on-crime politicians rose to power by pledging longer mandatory-minimum sentences and more intense policing practices. The American legal system became the primary tool for addressing the nation’s social ills. And as incarceration grew rapidly in the following decades, so, too, did the coffers of an emerging prison-industrial...

Nora McInerny is tired of small talk. "I don't want small talk ..." she says on her podcast. "I want the big talk." McInerny's show is called Terrible, Thanks for Asking , and she begins each interview with the same question: How are you? The responses she gets go way beyond the typical "I'm fine." McInerny deals with death, loss and coming through trauma. But her approach to these tough subjects is saturated with love and humor. She shares (or, as she puts it — overshares) some of her...

According to the World Health Organization, over 300 million people worldwide suffer from depression -- and treatments can be hit or miss. But two recent studies by Yale researchers have led to a new tool that may better personalize treatments for patients. Finding the right treatment for chronic depression can be as complicated as the disorder, which often includes multiple symptoms treated with varying degrees of success. Yale researchers wanted to know two things -- whether...

State education leaders said Wednesday they are still working to revise a proposed mental health policy for public schools and said it will likely be edited several more times before the State Board of Education votes on it. The first draft of the policy sparked outcry from charter schools and school boards last month. They objected to some of the guidelines, calling them well-meaning but too burdensome and expensive to implement. The original draft policy said all public schools should...

W hen a woman or girl is admitted to a mental health unit, her expectation should be of a caring, supportive environment where she can get the treatment she needs to get better. Unfortunately, we now know from Agenda’s latest research on restraint that many are instead in an environment where physical force has become shockingly routine. Agenda is an alliance of more than 70 organisations campaigning on behalf of women and girls at risk. We decided to ask for data about the use of restraint...

The average human being is living longer than ever before. Nearly every country on the planet has seen an increase in life expectancy since the beginning of the 21st century. But though we are living longer, not all of us are living healthier. Health Adjusted Life Expectancy (HALE), or healthy life expectancy, is a metric used by the World Health Organization to measure the number of years a person can expect to live in good health, taking social and economic factors into account alongside...