For the next few weeks, the new guided imagery tracks available in Spanish are shared via the Health Journeys website at no cost. Please check them. To find more about the series and the translator, go here. To sample the meditations, in Spanish, go here.
By Anna V. Smith, High Country News, June 11, 2020 As citizens across the country fill the streets to protest police killings of Black people , the violent response from law enforcement has added urgency to a national conversation about police brutality. Pressure is mounting to reform or abolish police departments. City officials in Western urban centers like Los Angeles are reducing police budgets — L.A.’s currently totals $1.8 billion — and reinvesting in underfunded social initiatives.
By Terry Gross, National Public Radio, June 16, 2020 In The Turnaway Study, Diana Greene Foster shares research conducted over 10 years with about 1,000 women who had or were denied abortions, tracking impacts on mental, physical and economic health. TERRY GROSS, HOST: This is FRESH AIR. I'm Terry Gross. When Mike Pence was running for vice president, he said, if we appoint strict constructionists to the Supreme Court, as Donald Trump intends to do, I believe we will see Roe v. Wade...
By Equal Justice Initiative, June 2020 Introduction In 1865, after two and a half centuries of brutal enslavement, Black Americans had great hope that emancipation would finally mean real freedom and opportunity. Most formerly enslaved people in the United States were remarkably willing to live peacefully with those who had held them in bondage despite the violence they had suffered and the degradation they had endured. Emancipated Black people put aside their enslavement and embraced...
By KQED Science, KQED, June 14, 2020 The coronavirus pandemic and the recent killing of George Floyd have brought longstanding racial inequities into sharp focus. One of those disparities concerns the high rate of coronavirus transmission among people of color. To talk about the intersection of race and health, KQED's Brian Watt spoke last week with California Surgeon General Dr. Nadine Burke Harris, who is known for her pioneering work on the role that childhood stress and trauma play on...
Not only are these sentences profound, but they reveal why Trump and his minions could not respond to covid and why the folks in OC revolted against masks and why Southwestern America is about to see avoidable deaths. (italics mine) It also uncovers the cultural and political lies that let fester the racism, poverty, stress and disarray that contribute so much to the epidemic of child abuse. "The (covid) pandemic has revealed, in the most profound way possible, the interconnectedness of a...
By Dakota Smith, Los Angeles Times, June 16, 2020 Several Los Angeles City Council members called Tuesday for a new emergency-response model that uses trained specialists, rather than LAPD officers, to render aid to homeless people and those suffering from mental health and substance abuse issues. A motion submitted by City Council members Nury Martinez, Herb Wesson, Marqueece Harris-Dawson, Curren Price and Bob Blumenfield asks city departments to work with the Los Angeles Police Department...
By Olga Rodriguez, Public Policy Institute of California, June 17, 2020 Mental health is the biggest issue students at California community colleges say they are facing during the pandemic. That is, 67% of students report higher levels of anxiety, stress, depression, or other mental distress. The sudden transition to an online learning environment drives some of this stress, as do struggles with job and income loss or paying for housing and utilities. For some students, the loss of income...
ACEs Aware in Action Welcome to the first issue of the ACEs Aware monthly newsletter, ACEs Aware in Action . Our goal is to keep you up to date on all the important work being done by providers, ACEs Aware partners, and the community to make sure everyone is ACEs Aware. Please share this with your colleagues and constituents and encourage them to visit www.ACEsAware.org to join the mailing list. Like many of you, we have watched as the events of the last weeks have brought renewed attention...
Guest Author, 6/17/20, positiveexperience.org Today’s post is based on an interview with Rev. Darrell Armstrong, pastor of the Shiloh Baptist Church of Trenton, NJ for the past 20 years. He is considered a national leader on issues pertaining to child welfare and family strengthening. Most questions contain links to video excerpts of the original interview. To watch, click the link on the corresponding question. Introduce yourself to our blog readers? My name is Darrell Armstrong. I’m in my...
By Michael Gerson, The Washington Post, June 8, 2020 On the theory that decency and sanity are rare enough these days that they should be recognized, let us praise Kay Coles James, the president of the Heritage Foundation. James — the first African American and the first woman to head the conservative think tank — reacted to the “horrific and needless death” of George Floyd in Minneapolis by recalling the reality of racism in her own story, in a Facebook post that appeared directly after the...
By Eli Hager and Weihua Li, The Marshall Project, June 10, 2020 The president of Minneapolis’s police union called George Floyd a “violent criminal” and those protesting his killing by a police officer a “terrorist movement.” A union chief in Baltimore once said Black Lives Matter activists were a “lynch mob ”; one in Philadelphia referred to them as “a pack of rabid animals.” Another has labeled St. Louis’s democratically elected prosecutor, who is black and supports police reform, a...
By Gustave Axelson, All About Birds, June 6, 2020 Birder Christian Cooper’s “happy place,” as he calls it, is New York City’s Central Park in spring. He remembers how he fell in love with it. “One moment, there was a Blackburnian Warbler at eye level, about arm’s length from me … just throwing its head back and belting out the song,” Cooper recalled on a Facebook livestream discussion on June 4. “I was paralyzed. I couldn’t move.” Just last week, on May 25, Cooper’s right to safely go...
By John Blake, CNN, June 12, 2020 The activist with the salt and pepper goatee who stood before me couldn't contain his euphoria. He had watched a video of four police officers brutalizing a black man pinned to the ground. The video had grabbed headlines and sparked widespread protests. Police departments vowed reform. Sure, these types of protests had happened before, he said, but this one felt different. "The balance of the power has shifted from the police to the populace," Donald Bakeer...
By Elizabeth Hlavinka, MedPage Today, June 15, 2020 LGBTQ students attending schools with gay-straight alliance programs in place reported experiencing less bullying and better health outcomes than their LGBTQ peers whose schools lacked such programs, according to a national survey. Among 17,112 LGBTQ high school respondents, 91% reported at least one experience with bullying of any type, and in fact most bullying was for "stigmatized identities" unrelated to gender identity or sexual...