Blog

It was a beautiful, warm and sunny Juneteenth in the City of Oakland. Around Lake Merritt, people were listening to music, riding off-road vehicles, having a drink, smoking a little weed...enjoying life. I was there soaking up the sun while celebrating the end of chattel slavery with my friends John and Juan “Swamp.” After an afternoon of talking about everything from adversity to political ideology to healing-centered interventions, we meandered through the food sellers strewn alongside the...

Mention the “love drug” Ecstasy and it conjures up images of young people at rave parties on the beach. But MDMA, the chemical compound better known as Ecstasy, is now gaining credibility as a potential treatment for severe trauma. The promise of MDMA (known to scientists as 3,4-methylenedioxymethamphetamine) as a therapeutic treatment was part of a conversation between Dr. Gabor Maté and pioneers in the field who are researching the synthetic drug to treat the painful manifestations of...

Raising public awareness of ACEs and translating ACEs knowledge into action was the theme of a June 23 virtual New Jersey ACEs Collaborative press conference ( click here to view the 45-min event and here for the press release). The overarching goal of the collaborative is to make the state “Trauma-Informed and Healing Centered.” We need to have more people “shouting from the rooftops” and taking action to address the root causes of ACEs, said Dave Ellis, Executive Director of the New Jersey...

By Candy Gibson, University of South Australia, June 23, 2021 A year-long Australian population study has found that full time workers employed by organisations that fail to prioritise their employees’ mental health have a threefold increased risk of being diagnosed with depression. And while working long hours is a risk factor for dying from cardiovascular disease or having a stroke, poor management practices pose a greater risk for depression, the researchers found. The University of South...

By Sahaj Kaur Kohli, Ideas.Ted.com, May 28, 2021 Every one of us has mental health in the same way that every one of us has physical health. Yet despite the prevalence of mental health struggles, there is still so much stigma around them. Worldwide the leading cause of disability is depression, according to the World Health Organization, and in the US alone, nearly 1 in 5 of adults lives with a mental illness. As a mental health therapist-in-training and the founder of Brown Girl Therapy ,...

By The Associated Press, NBC News, June 25, 2021 A Massachusetts town has created a fund to pay reparations to Black residents as communities and institutions across the country look to atone for slavery, discrimination and past wrongs amid the nation’s ongoing racial reckoning. The Amherst Town Council on Monday voted 12-1 in favor of establishing the fund and requiring a two-thirds vote of the council to authorize any spending from it, The Daily Hampshire Gazette reported . Michele Miller,...

By Stacy Cowley and Ella Koeze, The New York Times, June 27, 2021 Though Congress approved billions in aid for small companies to help them keep paying their employees during the pandemic, there was a big problem: It wasn’t reaching the tiniest and neediest businesses. Then two small companies came out of nowhere and, through an astute mix of technology and advertising — and the dogged pursuit of an opportunity that big banks missed — found a way to help those businesses. They also helped...

By Chandelis Duster, CNN Politics, June 24, 2021 Debt relief payments to farmers of color from the US Department of Agriculture were blocked nationwide Wednesday by a federal judge in Florida, the second halt on the payments as push back mounts against the assistance that some White farmers say is racially discriminatory. Florida District Judge Marcia Morales Howard issued a preliminary injunction in a lawsuit brought by a White farmer alleging the debt relief program authorized under the...

By Jesse Bedyan, The Mercury News, June 23, 2021 Since 2020, the top 10 Silicon Valley moguls have more than doubled their net worth to $571 billion while the average per capita income among Latinx residents in the valley increased by 5.4% to $30,618, according to the second annual Silicon Valley Pain Index released Tuesday. At the same time, the average income of Black residents declined by 1 percent to $40,381. “We’ve created Kings,” said Scott Myers-Lipton, the report’s lead author, “and...

By Dominique Gené, The Charlatan, June 24, 2021 A my Found said she remembers reading with kindergarten children from Grade 4 to Grade 6. She said it was her favourite thing to do. Her elementary school, Briargreen Public School in Ottawa, offered a program called reading buddies where older students were paired with younger ones to read together. It was programs like reading buddies and working with children at summer camps that Found said motivated her to become an educator. Found just...

By Ruth Gilbert and Rebecca Lacey, The Lancet, April 30, 2021 Having a parent who was maltreated as a child has been identified as the single most important risk factor for child maltreatment, but there is insufficient evidence from high-quality studies.1, 2 To date, only one published cohort study1 has used prospective, population-based administrative data to minimise biases due to recall, selective recruitment, response, and loss to follow up. In that study, the authors included 85 084...

While we like to think of our law enforcement officers as stoic, strong, and resilient, officers are not immune from the effects of trauma simply because they wear a uniform, enforce the law, or carry a badge and gun. Precisely because of their profession, they experience both primary and secondary trauma at higher levels due to their proximity to death, illness, accidents, and crimes.