Blog

Two things helped me parent with PTSD and manage PTSD symptoms. They are: 1. learning about attachment 2. learning about ACEs Leaning about ACEs gave me context and learning about attachment gave me tools for how to do parenting differently than it had been done in my own life. That's it. For some reason, neither had been discussed in my traditional "feel it to heal it" type of therapy. When I learned about ACEs I was not shocked that some people have high ACE scores. I was shocked that not...

Copied from my own blog, edited for profanity: theduramater.wordpress.com You guys... I had the most serendipitous day yesterday (Oct 28th), you wouldn't even believe it. I kid you not, by the end of the day I was seeing rainbows. Jake and I went to TEDx Charlotte, held this year at Central Piedmont Community College's Halton Theater, in the Overcash building, and it was an incredible experience. We couldn't get a babysitter for A, our youngest, so we chose which talks we were most...

Imagine if, during the Jim Crow era, a newspaper offered advertisers the option of placing ads only in copies that went to white readers. That’s basically what Facebook is doing nowadays. The ubiquitous social network not only allows advertisers to target users by their interests or background, it also gives advertisers the ability to exclude specific groups it calls “Ethnic Affinities.” Ads that exclude people based on race, gender and other sensitive factors are prohibited by federal law...

One evening 10 years ago, I rushed home from work to pick up my one-year-old daughter at her new caregiver’s house. When I arrived, I found my daughter strapped into her high chair, where she had apparently been restrained for hours. She fell apart when she saw me, sobbing and reaching out from the straps of the seat; her lower body was covered with a rash and a diaper that had not been changed in hours. The day before, her first there, had been little better: she had spent significant time...

Epidemic depression is occurring at a time when the field of mental health appears very robust. There are more mental health professionals treating more people than ever before in history: psychiatrists, clinical psychologists, licensed social workers, counselors, and therapists of all kinds. We have a powerful “therapeutic arsenal” of drugs to make us happier, calmer, and saner. When I leaf through the pharmaceutical ads that take up so much space in psychiatric journals, I get the feeling...

After reports that Child Protective Services caseworkers have let thousands of children at risk for abuse and neglect slip through the system’s cracks, a select team of police will begin to search the state for them. The more than 2,800 children aren’t missing – they’ve instead been put on waiting lists for state intervention after tips about their safety were called in on the Texas child abuse hotline. The move comes after a Senate Finance Committee meeting Wednesday. Lawmakers pressured...

Since Obamacare took effect, many more children in the United States have gotten health insurance, according to a new analysis . In 2008, 9 percent of kids under the age of 18 in America — that’s 6.9 million children — didn’t have health insurance. By 2015, that number had fallen to 3.5 million children, or 5 percent of the country’s kids. Children from families just above poverty level tended to see the biggest gains, but children of all income levels saw improvement recently. The...

We started the day with an icebreaker. “I harness the collective power of leaders, partners, and community members,” read the moderator. “That’s me!” shouted the group of several dozen people gathered on the campus of Yale University in New Haven, Conn., for a reunion of sorts. They came from diverse sectors and systems—from health care, education, nonprofits and government agencies—and their communities all had this in common: They are past winners of the RWJF Culture of Health Prize. Each...

The classic response for troubled students is reactive. Discipline. A trip to the vice principal’s office. Suspension. And, sometimes, expulsion. But more than 20 years of research on what causes students to become troubled shows that approach doesn’t work. The question, then, has been: What does? A U.S. Centers for Disease Control study looked at childhood traumas, known as adverse childhood experiences (ACEs), and the effects they have on young people as they grow up. A new initiative in...

In July 2013, a man arrived in the emergency room of a California hospital seeking treatment for his child. But when the intern on call walked in to see him, the father looked at her name tag and demanded another physician. As a Palestinian, he didn’t want his child treated by a Jewish doctor. The intern turned to her resident supervisor, Emily Whitgob, who told her colleagues about the incident. The episode helped motivate Whitgob to study how doctors in training and their institutions...

The US National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) has a new director. On September 12, psychiatrist Joshua Gordon took the reins at the institute, which has a budget of US$1.5 billion. He previously researched how genes predispose people to psychiatric illnesses by acting on neural circuits, at Columbia University in New York. His predecessor, Thomas Insel, left the NIMH to join Verily Life Sciences , a start-up owned by Google’s parent company Alphabet, in 2015. Gordon says that his...

Near a wooden “Death Row” signpost towering in an orange-lit fog, 25 young people huddled together, smiling and laughing. Few would guess the crowd waiting to enter the Los Angeles Haunted Hayride and Corn Maze was almost entirely made up of formerly incarcerated youth whose daily lives are in some ways more surreal than a scary event. Used to a totally regulated life on the inside, they are uncertain how to navigate life on the outside again. “You’re literally emerging from a time capsule,”...