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I woke up in an ambulance. The last thing I could remember was standing on a ledge in an auditorium and practicing for my school’s choir performance. I was in ninth grade, it was my first field trip in my new home here in the United States, and I was nervous. Then everything went black. I had fainted. Although my front teeth bore the brunt of my fall and saved me from serious injury, I had broken them all. As the paramedic gently explained to me why there was blood gushing from my mouth, he...

When Terrence Davenport first heard about the so-called gig economy, he was working at a free-meal program in his hometown of Dumas, Arkansas, a tiny village surrounded by cotton fields. Around 40 percent of Dumas’s roughly 5,000 residents lived in poverty. Most young people who left for college, as Davenport had done, never came back, and both the town’s population and its median salary—about $23,000 a year—were shrinking. “What did you eat today?” Davenport would ask kids he passed on the...

Oklahoma now has the highest incarceration rate in the U.S., unseating Louisiana from its long-held position as “ the world’s prison capital .” By comparison, states like New York and Massachusetts appear progressive, but even these states lock people up at higher rates than nearly every other country on earth. Compared to the rest of the world, every U.S. state relies too heavily on prisons and jails to respond to crime. The graphic above charts the incarceration rates of every U.S. state...

We as a nation have crossed so many ugly lines recently, yet one new policy of President Trump’s particularly haunts me. I’m speaking of the administration’s tactic of seizing children from desperate refugees at the border. “I was given only five minutes to say goodbye,” a Salvadoran woman wrote in a declaration in an A.C.L.U. lawsuit against the government, after her 4- and 10-year-old sons were taken from her. “My babies started crying when they found out we were going to be separated.”...

Adolescence arrives with a surge of emotional energy. It can empower youth to expand their capabilities, make new friends, depend less on parents, and live more passionately. The influence of parents remains important in a child’s life, and is necessary to support teens in making good choices. Adolescence is also a time when some teens look to experience alcohol or drugs (such as heroine, cocaine, marijuana, and prescription medicine, among other substances). All too often, tragic results...

Excerpt from article by David Love.

As we are well into the second year of this calamitous presidency I cannot avoid reflecting on some of my memories as well as my experiences as a psychotherapist. I grew up in Germany during the immediate post-World War II period. These days the new political “climate” in the US has some features similar to the years immediately before Hitler’s election as Germany’s new chancellor in 1933. 1 The new US administration that started 15 months ago strikes me as proto-fascistic, profoundly...

It usually takes the passage of time to identify the point when a movement gains momentum and advances to the next level. Reflecting on the evolution of Scotland’s ACEs/trauma-informed movement, one of its early leaders, Dr. Michael Smith, says the foundation was just being built two years ago when a visit by Jane Stevens, founder and publisher of ACEs Connection, galvanized core activists and convinced naysayers that ACEs science was real and had the power to transform lives and systems.

For six years now, life has been really good for James. He has a great job as the creative director of an advertising firm in New York City. He enjoys spending time with his wife and kids. And it has all been possible, he says, because for the past six years he has been taking a drug called ketamine . Before ketamine, James was unable to work or focus his thoughts. His mind was filled with violent images. And his mood could go from ebullient to dark in a matter of minutes. [For more on this...

There's been a lot of attention lately on low-income students on campus — mostly on how to recruit them and how to make them feel welcome. For good reason: Pell Grant recipients make up about a third of the undergraduate student population in the U.S., according to the College Board . And often, their experiences in college are very different than their wealthy classmates. Two recent reports offer a good snapshot as to what's happening for these students when it comes to college. One is from...

In the regular patterns of Brooklyn’s street grid, there’s a slight deformity near Prospect Park that makes one block slightly larger than the ones around it. On this block of brownstones in Park Slope, the streets give the houses a little more breathing room for their backyards. And for more than three decades, the community here has gone one step further, turning that space into a sprawling private park of their own creation. The result is a communal yard, divided only by unlocked fence...

Your boundaries are trying to take care of you, and if you couldn’t protect yourself during the trauma, you may have lost trust in your boundaries. Restoring your connection to your yes and no (your boundaries) is an important part of the healing process.