Blog

The United States has historically struggled with how to treat all its citizens equitably and fairly while wealth and power are concentrated in a very small segment of our society. Now, in the face of growing public awareness and outcry about the centuries-long injustices experienced by African Americans, Native Americans, new immigrants, and other marginalized groups, we believe that our nation urgently needs collaborative multisector approaches toward equity and justice. For maximum...

When Noel Anaya was just 1 year old, he and his five brothers and sisters were placed in the California foster care system. He has spent nearly all of his life in that system and has just turned 21. In California, that’s the age when people in foster care “age out” of the system and lose the benefits the system provides. That process becomes official at a final court hearing. Anaya, along with Youth Radio, got rare permission to record the proceeding, where he read a letter he wrote about...

In 2015, 5,545 children in San Francisco, CA, were reported to have experienced abuse. Of those, the reports of 753 children were substantiated. The expense to San Francisco for not preventing that abuse will cost $400,533 per child over his or her lifetime. That adds up to $301.6 million for just that one year, according to “ The Economics of Child Abuse: A Study of San Francisco.” And, because child abuse is profoundly underreported, the costs are likely to be as much as $5.6 billion/year,...

ChildWise Institute is really excited to announce Jim Sporleder as our featured expert at our May conference! You all know Jim as the former principal of Lincoln High School, which the documentary film, Paper Tiger's, is all about. ChildWise works closely with Jim, and he will be presenting and teaching his new guidebook, The Trauma-Informed School: A Step-by-Step Implementation Guide for Administrators and School Personnel . Unlike a typical ChildWise educational event, conference or...

I am, of course, pleased that Theresa May recognises that increasing numbers of adults and children are suffering from mental health difficulties ( May pledges to try to reduce stigma , 9 January). The huge emotional burden this puts on families only increases the risks. These difficulties have escalated in the six years since massive cuts to public services and most preventive mental health services, alongside the increased culture of competition that leads to more anxiety and less...

You may wake up one wintry, dreary weekday morning and say, "It's only Tuesday but it feels like Friday. I can't stand it. There is no way I can go in. That presentation will have to be rescheduled. I'm taking a mental health day and am calling in sick." Ideally those mornings are very rare, if they happen at all. Rather than relax you, those moments of decision can cause huge stress and make going in to work easier than thinking about staying home. The biggest challenge most of us have with...

When teenagers and young adults suffer a psychotic episode, they're more likely to develop serious mental illnesses later, and the longer it goes untreated the more serious the issues can become. With that in mind, a new program and partnership between the state of Montana and area mental health experts and organizations announced Tuesday aims to provide treatment early on in an effort to keep their conditions from getting worse. During a Tuesday press conference at Billings Clinic, Gov.

Interdisciplinary Research Leaders (IRL) is a national leadership development program that brings together teams of researchers and community leaders to: • Connect a community’s pressing needs to health research and policy efforts; • Collaborate and share expertise to build healthier, more equitable communities. • Develop leadership and advanced research skills for building a Culture of Health, enabling all people to live longer, healthier lives now and for generations to come. For this...

If you’ve ever wondered why you’ve been struggling a little too hard for a little too long with chronic emotional and physical health conditions that just won’t abate, feeling as if you’ve been swimming against some invisible current that never ceases, a new field of scientific research may offer hope, answers, and healing insights. Full link to this in-depth article by Donna Jackson Nakazawa.

A trio of socially conscious films, followed by discussion, are being screened at the Kent Recreation and Cultural Centre in Agassiz. They are geared toward youth and parents and seek to address the challenge of parenting in the digital era. The first film Screenagers Growing Up In The Digital Age was shown on Dec. 8, but will be featured again, due to extreme weather that accounted for a poor turnout at the original screening. “It’s really important to manage the screen time of youth, we’re...

Norway, like many European states, has public offerings many Americans would consider political fantasy. There is lengthy paid maternity leave , free university education, and long-term unemployment benefits. What is it about the Norwegian state—or about Scandinavian countries in general—that leads their populations to support redistribution policies in a way that Americans don’t? A group of Scandinavian researchers recently did an experiment trying to tease that out. Their goal: to find out...

You remember the photo: A little boy on a beach, his head turned a bit to the side, as if he had just fallen asleep. The boy had in fact drowned, a harrowing casualty of his family’s flight from war-torn Syria. Though the photo spurred the world to action, that momentum soon faded—a fact that, unfortunately, wasn’t much of a surprise . What’s more remarkable, according to a strongly-worded new study : By the time Aylan Kurdi drowned, hundreds of thousands had been killed in the war, and...