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About 8 percent of high school students are lesbian, gay or bisexual, according to the first nationwide survey asking teens about their sexuality. The survey results released by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention earlier this month found that these teenagers face a shockingly high level of violence compared with their straight peers. The report is a call to action for adults who care about youth, said Debra Hauser, president of Advocates for Youth , a nonprofit focusing on the...

The great Louisiana Floods of 2016 have led to the closure of at least 22 of the state’s 70 public school districts , with additional districts calling off classes as a precaution given the immense devastation. This means that as many as one-third of the state’s public school students were out of school last week, and potentially for many weeks to come. That equates to more than 241,000 children who are not in classrooms where they belong; and these figures do not even account for the many...

By the end of the summer, Florida will have cut all ties with youth prison contractor Youth Services International, a company that’s been plagued by allegations of abuse and substandard conditions for decades. Over the years, state after state abandoned their contracts with YSI until the for-profit company was operating only in Florida. But earlier this year, state officials said the company would end all contracts with YSI as the result of a lawsuit. As new companies take over the...

Issue: Finding ways to improve outcomes and reduce spending for patients with complex and costly care needs requires an understanding of their unique needs and characteristics. Goal: Examine demographics and health care spending and use of services among adults with high needs, defined as people who have three or more chronic diseases and a functional limitation in their ability to care for themselves or perform routine daily tasks. Methods: Analysis of data from the 2009–2011 Medical...

Do you have clients with health concerns, injuries, or acute/chronic illnesses? According to NSCAW, 28% of children in foster care have a chronic health condition, and 12% have two or more. About 35% of children in child welfare have either a health condition or special need. Your clients with medical conditions will likely have frequent contact with the health care system. Since many have experienced prior trauma, when faced with medical issues they are at greater risk for illness- or...

You’ve undoubtedly heard about the recent report issued by the Civil Rights Division of the U.S. Department of Justice condemning various police practices in Baltimore. What has gone largely unmentioned, however, is the report’s detailed review of how encounters between police and people with mental illnesses result in “unnecessarily violent confrontations.” This situation should resonate with every community and every law enforcement agency in the U.S., and the solution isn’t as...

This free publication offers tips for coping with grief after an incident of community violence. Introduces some of the signs of grief and anger, provides useful information about how to cope with grief, and offers tips for helping children deal with grief. [Get it here http://store.samhsa.gov/product/Coping-With-Grief-After-Community-Violence/SMA14-4888]

Humans often make bad decisions. If you like Snickers more than Milky Way, it seems obvious which candy bar you’d pick, given a choice of the two. Traditional economic models follow this logical intuition, suggesting that people assign a value to each choice—say, Snickers: 10, Milky Way: 5—and select the top scorer. But our decision-making system is subject to glitches. In one recent experiment, Paul Glimcher , a neuroscientist at New York University, and collaborators asked people to choose...

Advances in biology are providing deeper insights into how early experiences are built into the body with lasting effects on learning, behavior, and health. Numerous evaluations of interventions for young children facing adversity have demonstrated multiple, positive effects but they have been highly variable and difficult to sustain or scale. New research on plasticity and critical periods in development, increasing understanding of how gene-environment interaction affects variation in...

It’s one thing to feel like you need a break, it’s another thing to convince yourself that you should take one. The way that after sitting still for a long time your body craves stretching and moving around, your brain craves a change of subject and a chance to unwind after focusing on the same tasks day in and day out. Aside from just making you feel better and happier, taking a vacation has noticeable benefits to your health and your productivity. [See more at ...

Catherine left her husband the day he threatened to kill her and bury her body in the desert. Ending 22 years of physical and emotional abuse, she packed her bags and moved out with her daughter, then 15. For a while the two managed, though money was tight. After her daughter left for college, however, Catherine began to fall apart. For six months, she worked delivery services during the day and slept in her 1996 Oldsmobile most nights. When she could afford it, she would check into a motel...

Last year, researchers from Vanderbilt University’s Peabody Research Institute released a paper detailing their evaluation of the state of Tennessee’s pre-K program, focusing specifically on the state’s most disadvantaged four-year-olds. Their results came in contrast to most of the previous evaluations of early childhood education programs, which found impressive long-term results, but focused on very small, high-quality, expensive programs and relied on small sample sizes — the infamous...