Blog

Check Your Mail! The ACEs Aware “State of CAre” campaign kicked off in May to raise awareness about Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs), toxic stress, and the long-term health effects they can have on children and adults if not addressed. The goal is for clinical teams to take the free, online ACEs Aware training and get certified to screen for ACEs. As part of the campaign, a package of new ACEs Aware materials has been sent to all eligible Medi-Cal providers across the state. In early...

By Nikki Wentling, Stars and Stripes, August 25, 2021 President Joe Biden on Wednesday signed a bill into law that will allow some veterans with mental health conditions to receive service dogs. The new law orders the Department of Veterans Affairs secretary to develop and launch a five-year pilot program that provides service dog training to benefit veterans diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder. Previously, the VA only covered some costs of service dogs for veterans with certain...

By Alejandra Salgado, Cal Matters, August 23, 2021 This past school year, Madeline Waters struggled to find a way to pay for food while also studying for classes. As a nutrition major at Sacramento State, she wasn’t unfamiliar with what skipping meals could mean for her academic career. So this spring she applied, yet again, for food stamps. “I was really hungry, and my brain cells were barely functioning,” she said. “I was trying to get food and I’d fill out the paperwork and I was trying...

By Michael Tubbs and Libby Schaaf, The Imprint, August 16, 2021 L orrine Paradela is a single mom raising two kids on a tight budget who knows what it’s like to stay up at night worrying about how to pay the bills. She is not alone, particularly since the pandemic, which has put an even heavier economic burden on women of color. What sets her apart is that she had an economic lifeline during the height of the pandemic — an extra $500 a month on top of the income from her job. As a...

Anxiety, depression, and suicide is historically high, especially during the COVID-19 pandemic, where our world has changed so drastically. It has left many feeling isolated, fearful, lonely, sad, and unsure of the future. In this live webinar, Dr. Kristin Beasley, Clinical Psychologist, will discuss building a community of support, self-care tips, building resilience in difficult times, healthy communication methods, and more! We are all in this together! Share this time with us! September...

From Vote Save America, August 2021 *Interactive website with voting information for California voters. California! Back in the day, people searched your state for gold. Now, they search for a place with oat milk (which is just as expensive.) But California has a lot going for it. So all you shiny, happy people running on beaches better be exercising YOUR RIGHT TO VOTE as well. Here’s everything you need to know in the Golden State. You may have heard about this "recall election." You may be...

In the last article in this series of four posts on seasonal affective disorder SAD and its relation to complex trauma, we examined together with their definitions and each of their symptoms. As a short recap, seasonal affective disorder is a form of major depression that affects people in the wintertime, although it can also strike in spring. For our purposes, we shall concentrate on wintertime SAD. Complex trauma is repeated abuse or neglect, usually in childhood, committed against...

By Giles Bruce, Center for Health Journalism, August 19, 2021 For some time now, early childhood experts have acknowledged that the first few years of a child’s life are critical for neurological development, and that growing up in a stressful environment can actually change the structure of the budding brain . Now researchers are increasingly finding that the human brain is shaped — quite literally, in some instances — by external forces while it is still in utero. “We really need to...

By Joanne Chen, Greater Good Magazine, August 23, 2021 In January 1995, Tariq Khamisa was 20 years old. Tony Hicks was 14. Khamisa, a college student, was working his shift delivering pizza the night Hicks’s gang tried to rob him. According to The San Diego Union-Tribune , when the gang leader handed Hicks a gun and told him to shoot, he did. Khamisa died. Hicks was tried as an adult and ultimately received a sentence of 25 years to life in prison. Justice seemed to have prevailed—a severe...

By Fredreka Schouten, CNN Politics, August 24, 2021 A preliminary ruling by a three-judge panel in North Carolina is clearing the way for roughly 56,000 of the state's residents who have been convicted of felonies -- but who aren't currently serving prison time -- to register to vote , civil rights groups said. The action comes out of a lawsuit by civil rights groups and ex-offenders who have challenged a North Carolina law that denies the right to vote to felons until they have completed...

By The Ezra Klein Show, The New York Times, August 24, 2021 “Trauma is much more than a story about something that happened long ago,” writes Dr. Bessel van der Kolk. “The emotions and physical sensations that were imprinted during the trauma are experienced not as memories but as disruptive physical reactions in the present.” Van der Kolk, a psychiatrist by training, has been a pioneer in trauma research for decades now and leads the Trauma Research Foundation. His 2014 book, “The Body...

In honor of September suicide prevention month, please read more to view, post, and share the "Don't Give Up" suicide prevention song animation video and public service announcement. I will also be facilitating a FREE Arts and Healing Resiliency Workshop: Phoenix Bird Rising online on Sunday September 5th at 1:00 PM - 2:30 PM (PST). Click here to register for the workshop .