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Few of us have forgotten the searing images of the impact of Hurricane Katrina on the Gulf Coast, especially how the great American City of New Orleans was left in shambles—a testament to longstanding social and economic problems that preceded the storm and a nation that was unprepared after it occurred. In the decade that followed Katrina—one that included the largest offshore oil spill in U.S. history—recovery across the region has varied, but there have been several success stories. For...

If you landed behind bars for a non-violent drug offense, President Barack Obama wants to set you free. On Wednesday, Obama commuted the sentences of 214 federal inmates, the most granted by a president since the Department of Justice began tracking clemency data in 1900. According to the White House, Obama has granted “more commutations than the previous nine presidents combined.” The Washington Post reports he is issuing an average of seven clemency actions a month (that’s both...

Eight hours of uninterrupted sleep per night—it’s so widely recommended it approaches an axiom. The strange thing is, there’s nothing natural about it. In a landmark 1992 study , Thomas Wehr demonstrated that humans, like many other animals, are naturally inclined to sleep in bouts, separated by periods of activity. Given 10 hours per day of light, instead of the modern sixteen hours of artificial lights-on time, subjects sleep in two symmetrical blocks of several hours each. In the middle...

The theme of trauma was selected for this year’s annual summer Clinical Pastoral Education (CPE) Day because “clergy responses to trauma an have a significant impact on our own healing and in healing our communities,” as described in the planning committee welcome letter. Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore hosted the gathering of over 100 pastoral students from the Maryland, Washington, DC, and Northern Virginia region. Planning Committee Chair Ty Crowe, director of the Hospital’s Spiritual...

Suicide is a rare, but emotionally devastating, event. I am sometimes criticized for minimizing its impact. That is not my purpose. Completed suicides number slightly less than 43,000 in 2015. For every suicide, there are a reported 25 attempts. Ideation strikes many more. If we examine the rate of suicide in our country, I believe it can guide us to a greater state of understating about the emotional health of our population. I know determining the results are more difficult, but if our...

Its news to no one that the Great Recession caused tremendous suffering and mental anguish among families struggling to pay their bills, keep their jobs or find new ones. Less noted, however, has been what such a massive economic collapse has meant for the mental health of children. Did kids growing up over the past decade see their mental health measurably worsen, or were parents largely able to buffer their kids from the stresses of a tanking economy? New evidence comes in the form of a...

When it’s three o’clock in the morning and you’re anxious, the whole world doesn’t exactly fall apart, but stretches endlessly before you. On one such night recently, I sat in a ball on the desk chair in my home office and breathed rapidly but quietly, so as not to wake my husband sleeping in the next room. My mind, incapable of holding one thought for more than a few seconds, communicated in zaps and bolts that traveled down my spine. A car drove by outside and I thought about how much I...

If you live in a neighborhood that is saturated with fast-food restaurants and bodegas but does not have a grocery store, you are probably going to find it very difficult to stick to a healthy diet. It would likely be similarly hard to manage your finances and build wealth without a bank branch in your neighborhood. Unfortunately, that is exactly what an increasing percentage of households in the United States are being told to do: manage their finances and build wealth without access to a...

Today is Part 7 in a five-week, 25-part series exploring solutions for police brutality in America. The problem of police brutality is actually deeply entrenched and amazingly complicated. Most of the factors that ultimately lead to fatal encounters happen long before the actual incidents ever take place. Police brutality has no quick fixes. No one single solution will solve the problem. Instead, it must be tackled from dozens of different angles, but as a part of one comprehensive plan.

[Photo by Ali imran zaidi ] Speaking for my gender, there are two qualities that define most men: We seldom like to ask for help, and we do not like to talk about our feelings. Combining the two -- asking for help about our feelings -- is the ultimate affront to many men's masculinity. We like to think of ourselves as strong, problem-solver types. But when it comes to emotional and mental issues, men need to quit trying to bottle up their feelings and tough it out, says Darshan Mehta, M.D.,...

Imagine you’re the manager of a café. It stays open late and the neighbourhood has gone quiet by the time you lock the doors. You put the evening’s earnings into a bank bag, tuck that into your backpack, and head home. It’s a short walk through a poorly lit park. And there, next to the pond, you realise you’ve been hearing footsteps behind you. Before you can turn around, a man sprints up and stabs you in the stomach. When you fall to the ground, he kicks you, grabs your backpack, and runs...

The scene opens with me on a bathroom floor in the first days of 2016, cradling a knife and threatening to kill myself, but it starts much earlier, months and months before, when I moved from North Carolina to the Bay Area and felt my small-town axis shift with the violence of an earthquake. Sometimes it takes a radical re-configuring of the landscape — the sorts of tremors that expose our tenderest parts — to show us what was really dormant all along. For those, like me, who have...