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[Photo By Eli Christman - https://www.flickr.com/photos/gammaman/7170043719/, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=33160412] “Overall, the researchers found that yoga holds potential promise for helping improve anxiety, depression, PTSD and/or the psychological consequences of trauma”, according to a University of North Carolina (UNC) at Chapel Hill news-release regarding a study by researchers at its School of Social Work. Release adds that the study “suggested that...

How easy is it to get help with mental health problems in the UK? It’s a topical issue, with reports of long waiting lists and some people being sent miles from home for treatment . Our mental health services are struggling to meet demand – and the government has vowed to invest more money to make improvements in England. The level of care you get appears to vary, depending on where you are. New guidelines recommend that people with anxiety and depression should get talking therapies within...

It's been years in the making, but finally, a plan to help scores of nonviolent, mentally ill people avoid jail and get treatment will take shape in the coming year, Dallas County leaders said Monday. The changes, to be primarily funded with a $7 million private grant, aims to bring fewer mentally ill people to the jail, release more of them while they await trial and connect them with services once they're freed so they don't return. The goal: to facilitate treatment for mentally ill people...

In this sequel to his ‘problem statement,’ outlining the pervasiveness of trauma in our daily South African lives [published on Biznews earlier this week], trauma activist Brian Rogers asks why our public health system has not dealt with psychological trauma, and continues to ignore its’ huge societal costs. As a former News Editor at the SA Medical Journal, I’ve written about the debilitating cost of not treating mental health properly – equal to some two percent of our GDP, UCT’s...

Orange County hopes to get homeless residents into housing – and help them stay there. Riverside County plans to connect former inmates with health clinics and social services. Placer County is opening a respite center where homeless patients can go after they leave the hospital. Those are just some of the pilot projects in a $3 billion experimental effort officials hope will improve the health of California’s most vulnerable populations. The effort is a recognition that improving people’s...

Immigrants comprised 23 percent of all parents with young children (ages 0-8) in the United States, or almost 8.4 million in total as of 2010–14. Twenty-four percent lived below the federal poverty level, compared with 15 percent of their native-born counterparts. By addressing the needs of low-income parents and their young children simultaneously, two-generation programs have great potential to uplift whole families and break cycles of intergenerational poverty. Generally speaking, these...

Three decades ago, a team of researchers at Kaiser Permanente Medical Center in San Diego asked thousands of patients about traumatic events from their childhood. The responses were collected and analyzed against health records for a study known as the Adverse Childhood Experiences study or ACEs, a landmark study in the field of trauma research. The researchers found a strong correlation between the ten adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) - which include physical and sexual abuse, losing a...

Note: Facebook friends are funny. I "met" Matt, online , last year after writing about missing my absent father. A friend, Laura, introduced us because of our common bond. We three share the Dad-who-went-gone-while-alive thing. We each have a father who disappeared, by choice, who let us down, betrayed, beat , abandoned or other not so ideal parental things. We three know the way a parent can haunt and follow and stalk the consciousness for days turned decades long after childhood ends. We...

The ACEs Messaging Group (AMG) met on Tuesday, December 13 th to discuss small group the work that had been done in November in lieu of a larger group meeting. The group began with a history and overview of the work, revisiting the discussion of particular target audiences: youth, parents of young children, and older adults. Each small group then updated the larger AMG about their work. The group focused on youth reported back about the event that took place at UrbanPromise in which a group...

Writing for this blog is sometimes problematic for me. I try to be as transparent as possible and talk about the things that are truly affecting my life in the moment. I want it to be honest, and sometimes that means discussing emotions and feelings that are difficult or painful to put into words. Recently, I was at an event and a woman asked a question that I hear often, “How did you overcome the abandonment of your mother?” The answer is burdensome, and often shocking for audiences. The...

Last week, the Department of Defense (DOD) announced a new plan to provide more support to military men who are sexually assaulted. Research has shown that sexual assault of servicemen is rampant. Although women in the military are at a higher risk, more men experience some type of sexual assault each year due to the fact that the organization skews so heavily male. The DOD estimates that only 10 percent of male victims come forward to report an assault. This new plan aims to change that.

How strongly does childhood shape adult lives? Quite a bit depends on how we answer that question. If we view childhood as a basically frivolous interlude whose hard knocks can be overcome with hard work and persistence later on, we might not have reason to invest much as a society in early childhood programs. But if we see the earliest years as laying down enduring tracks for everything from health to lifelong earning potential, then suddenly those first years become some of life’s most...