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It was in 2011, after Camilo Pineda Obando moved to Pacifica, California, a small city just south of San Francisco, when his perception of reality took a sudden, dark shift. It wasn’t the first time the 21-year-old aspiring music producer had experienced episodes of anxiety and paranoia, but this was different. Walking down the street, he felt like the protagonist in a nightmarish video game populated with mysterious characters, some good, others evil. An agonizing sense of responsibility to...

Pushing up the cuffs of his plaid shirt and adjusting his glasses, the ninth-grader Colton Gaudette looks across the small classroom conference table. “Welcome to my student-led conference,” he says. “Thank you for inviting me,” answers his mother, Terry Gaudette, sitting next to Colton’s adviser and biology teacher. This meeting, which happens twice a year, has replaced the old format of parent-teacher conferences at Pittsfield Middle High School, a rural New Hampshire campus that takes a...

Despite the challenge of growing up in tough areas with few resources, thousands of inner city kids manage to excel academically. But even some students who seem to thrive early on run a significant risk of faltering on their quest for college degrees or the elite jobs they once envisioned. So what’s the deciding factor behind kids who meet their potential and those who wind up falling short? That’s the question undertaken by researchers Stefanie DeLuca, Susan Clampet-Lundquist, and Kathryn...

The American Dental Association issued a report which indicated as many as 75 percent of drinkers confirmed they don’t clean their teeth after a night of drinking. Sixty-percent of those surveyed said they had a “furry” feeling on their teeth following the fun. Everyone grasps that furry teeth are a sign of plaque build-up. Plaque on the teeth is a compilation of bacteria which will be remaining on the teeth all night long. Ultimately, you will have problems. Dental health concerns often...

Diabetes rates nearly doubled in the past three decades, largely due to increases in obesity and sugary diets, according to a report released Wednesday by the World Health Organization . The percentage of adults living with diabetes worldwide grew from 4.7% in 1980 to 8.5% in 2014. Overall, there was a nearly four-fold increase in worldwide cases: An estimated 422 million adults were living with diabetes in 2014, up from 108 million in 1980. The WHO describes diabetes as a serious, chronic...

Human brains simplify information under stress. Largely out of awareness, we have a tendency to categorize experiences into extremes of good and bad, black and white, right or wrong. Most of life, however, happens in the gray areas. We lose the subtleties that are always there if we are too quick to know. When I take something personally or feel stung by something someone said or did, I try to remind myself to get curious about other meanings, other ways of understanding the moment. For...

As the connection between exposure to trauma and long-term health conditions becomes clear, the health care sector is beginning to focus on how to best care for patients with a history of trauma. For many people, trauma may increase their risk of serious health issues leading to poor health outcomes and higher medical and social service costs. Health care providers can address patients’ traumatic experiences and their associated health effects by implementing trauma-informed approaches to...

The Attitudes Related to Trauma-Informed (ARTIC) Scale is the first psychometrically valid measure of TIC published in the peer reviewed literature. It measures service providers’ attitudes favorable or unfavorable toward TIC. Get more information and join a FREE webinar about the ARTIC.

In the UK, nearly 10,000 young women are diagnosed with breast cancer every year and the treatment for many is mastectomy – the surgical removal of one or more of their breasts. It's easy to assume that the effect on their body image will be negative, and UK guidelines currently state that all mastectomy patients should be told about options for reconstructive surgery. However, a key message to emerge from a new survey of young women who have undergone mastectomy is that there is huge...

If you're a regular listener to the Standard, you may remember Courtney Meeks . She's homeless and pregnant. When we met her in January, Meeks was standing at the corner of a busy intersection in Austin asking drivers for money. Back then, she thought she was really close to giving birth. Some of her other uncertainties were also part of the story we aired. Listeners responded in force. Many of you wrote saying Ms. Meeks should get in touch with local nonprofits and ask for help. Joy Diaz...

For decades, Cassandra Steptoe felt like she couldn't talk about her HIV diagnosis with anyone. "I couldn't forgive myself for getting HIV," says Steptoe, who spent much of her early adult life in and out of jail for shoplifting and burglaries linked to her IV drug use. "But someone told me a long time ago, if you are looking for a reason to feel shame, you can always find it. I learned to look for something else: forgiveness." It wasn't until Steptoe, now 59 and a grandmother, was in her...

Alcohol, Cannabis , trauma? Cannabis, or marijuana, has been deemed the "gateway" drug for years, carrying the stigma that its use is a pathway for potential abuse/use of "harder drugs". Although the studies have shown that alcohol as the actual gateway drug Cannabis is still attributed to drug use. What is hardly mentioned is the fact that trauma, sustained over long periods of time, actually alters the brain's prefrontal cortex, which is responsible for risk taking behaviors, moral...