America's prison state is a disaster. One percent of the adult population is behind bars, and corrections is squeezing higher education out of state budgets. We have five times as many people in prison as we ever had before 1980, and five times...
A 17-year-old youth removed a pair of audio headphones and smiled as he stepped out of a San Francisco sound booth on a Wednesday afternoon. He had just recorded his first hip-hop song. “Man, it’s warm in there!” he declared,...
Jerome Pate, a homeless alcoholic, went to the emergency room when he was cold. He went when he needed a safe place to sleep. He went when he was hungry, or drunk, or suicidal. “I’d go sometimes just to have a place to be,” he...
Let me ask you a question. How would you react if you discovered a trusted relative was sexually abusing a child in your family? Or maybe the abuser is a highly respected, influential person in an organization you support. Would you...
Doctors are much more likely to level with patients who have cancer than patients who have Alzheimer's, according to a report released this week by the Alzheimer's Association. The report found that just 45 percent of Medicare patients who'd...
More than 5 million Americans have dementia, and that number is only climbing. Each case leaves some people wondering what's left in a friendship when the bond between confidants becomes literally unthinkable, when language and thinking fail....
Young composers and people with experience of mental illness are using the genre of classical song to de-stigmatise the issue. The unique collaboration, which includes compelling descriptions of being sectioned and frank accounts of life with...
A fatal shooting last year by police in Albuquerque, New Mexico, of a homeless man with a history of schizophrenia triggered large demonstrations. A month later, Milwaukee police shot a mentally ill man 14 times. In Dallas, a person with mental...
United Way ACEs/Resiliency Strategic Plan Long-term Goal: Build a resilient community. Goal 1: Increase community awareness of ACEs/resiliency. Activities ACEs Presentations/Trainings objective: To increase...
It is rare for a work of sociology to leave readers choking back emotion. Max Weber and Emile Durkheim were not known for writing tear-jerkers. But Robert D. Putnam’s “Our Kids: The American Dream in Crisis” is sociology as story, as...
Is your job killing you? According to death statistics from 2011 compiled by the CDC, the top three killers in the United States are heart disease, cancer and chronic lower respiratory diseases like emphysema. Collectively these diseases killed...
Imagine a society where convicts were sentenced to death by untreated renal failure or denial of chemotherapy. Modern Americans would surely consider such a place barbaric and cruel. Yet in the 1990s and 2000s, California essentially meted out...
As psychiatrists and family therapists, we spend a great deal of time working with men on issues of fatherhood including the themes of communication, commitment, identity, intimacy and trust. The men we work with come to us because they have...
DZHOKHAR TSARNAEV is facing the death penalty or life in prison for the Boston Marathon bombing. But what if, instead, the maximum prison sentence were just 21 years? That was the sentence that Anders Behring Breivik received in 2012 after...
No matter where you fall on the feminist spectrum, it’s undeniable that women now have unprecedented choices about how they choose to live their lives. This is not to say these choices are free from judgment, however. In new books about...