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When children are removed from home, parents feel a level of grief and stress that can hardly be explained. Then they often face more stress, with things like losing a job because of mandated services, losing housing and juggling multiple services. When our bodies feel too much pressure and threat, stress can put us in an “act now, think later” mentality that makes it even harder to do what’s needed. Stress can also make it harder to learn and plan. These reactions can affect parents’ cases.

This past Valentine’s Day, Brook addressed the insidious role hate plays in health, arguing in a JAMA article that medical professionals should play a larger role in combatting intolerance. Brook, who is also a Distinguished Chair in Health Care Services at the RAND Corporation, believes medical professionals have a responsibility to reduce intolerance, along with the necessary widespread respect to make a real difference. “ It is time to expand the WHO’s definition of health to include...

Think of a dull, gray space in your city that people walk through each day, but generally detest. What would it take to turn it into a genuinely appealing place where people actually want to hang out? Maybe not as much as you’d think. That’s what designers in Canberra, Australia, learned when they decided to spruce up an imposing concrete plaza to make it more attractive to locals. Their interventions weren’t huge, expensive, or particularly novel: Color is the most noticeable addition they...

There's stress and then there's toxic stress — that feeling of being chronically overwhelmed, anxious, or depressed. Catherine Monk, Ph.D. studies the effect this kind of stress has on babies before they're born. She sat down with KPCC's early childhood reporter Devin Browne to explain more. WHAT’S THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN STRESS AND TOXIC STRESS? IS IT JUST A MATTER OF DEGREE? It’s degree, but it’s also what’s contributing to the stress. We all have stress about getting an assignment done for...

For everyone, there are times when a dark cloud just seems to be following you around. You may not even even know why. While we don’t mean to minimize the value of medication for those who experience this on a daily basis, UCLA neuroscientist Alex Korb , author of The Upward Spiral: Using Neuroscience to Reverse the Course of Depression, One Small Change at a Time , has some insights that might just get you back on the sunny side. It’s all got to do with neuroscience. [For more of this...

In a previous post , I explained that this fall I worked with the children on understanding and interpreting the Lord's Prayer. The Lord's Prayer, or "Our Father," posed many interesting opportunities to discuss themes that each and ever one of us struggle with. It was a challenge preparing a lesson for children with emotional disturbance dealing with complicated teachings in scripture. It was an exercise in combatting "Christian-ese" and the simple Sunday school answers (you know... when in...

(Ted Talks) Ted X Helena, Montana brought us Judge James Reynolds who is a presiding judge for Drug Treatment Court in Helena, Montana. There have been many articles of Justice System Reform, and Juvenile's; Pipeline to Prison crisis. This Ted talk informs us how empathy and restoration as a grounds for recovery brings hope and a second chance to those whom society would generally have written off as a life long criminal. We can see Trauma Informed Care in action, and although this work is...

Health care professionals increasingly recognize the detrimental impact of trauma on patients’ lives and health outcomes. As a result, there is burgeoning interest in the use of evidence-based trauma treatments and the delivery of trauma-informed care. Five leading complex care organizations across the country recently sought to train their staff in a variety of evidence-based trauma treatment approaches: Seeking Safety ; Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing ; and Attachment,...

This video was first posted in 2015, and has had more than 11.5 million downloads. Grace Harris, an ACEs Connection member from Santa Rosa, CA, just reminded me of it today. I hope many of those people who've watched this video are physicians and people who work in substance abuse clinics, so that we all understand that the solution to our substance abuse problems is to make sure we all live in Rat Park. If you haven't a clue as to what I'm talking about, take six minutes to watch this, and...

Climate change is taking an obvious physical toll on earth: from depleted farmland to the rise of toxic pollution to the degradation of long-stable ecosystems to the disappearance of biodiversity and endangered species. But looking beyond the physical, experts are also trying to sound the alarm about the quieter, more insidious effects of climate change : namely, that global warming is threatening the emotional health of humans worldwide. “We see a sense of despair that sets in as inevitably...

On January 2, 1979, Dr. Rafael Osheroff was admitted to Chestnut Lodge, an inpatient psychiatric hospital in Maryland. Osheroff had a bustling nephrology practice. He was married with three children, two from a previous marriage. Everything had been going well except his mood. For the previous two years, Osheroff had suffered from bouts of anxiety and depression. Dr. Nathan Kline, a prominent psychopharmacologist in New York City, had begun Osheroff on a tricyclic antidepressant and,...

Chicago is in dire need of solutions for its violent crime. A cognitive behavioral therapy program has been able to help keep teenage boys from acting out on their impulses. AUDIE CORNISH, HOST: Seven hundred sixty-six. That's how many people were murdered in Chicago last year. The city's on pace to match that number this year. Plenty of community organizations are looking for ways to stop the violence. NPR's social science correspondent, Shankar Vedantam, has the story of one program that's...