Blog

In Alaska , a coalition of tribal governments has now begun to assume responsibility for offering some child welfare services to Alaska Native children. The Alaska Tribal Child Welfare Compact , which was signed into law in October 2017 by Alaska Gov. Bill Walker (I), allows 18 Alaska tribes to provide child welfare services with the goal of reducing the disproportionate number of Native children in foster care in the state. Previously, these services were managed solely through the state’s...

In Great Britain , midwives deliver half of all babies , including Kate Middleton’s first two children , Prince George and Princess Charlotte. In Sweden, Norway and France, midwives oversee most expectant and new mothers, enabling obstetricians to concentrate on high-risk births. In Canada and New Zealand, midwives are so highly valued that they’re brought in to manage complex cases that need special attention. All of those countries have much lower rates of maternal and infant mortality...

You’re given a choice: Would you rather spend your day feeling happy, versus happy interspersed with some moments of sadness, frustration, and anxiety? Most of us would choose the first option in a heartbeat. Psychologists, too, long championed the importance of cultivating positive emotions as one path toward optimizing well-being, resilience to stressors, and salutary physical health outcomes. Not surprisingly, when people are asked what emotions they want to feel , they place a heavy...

Ijeoma Oluo's So You Want to Talk About Race is an unapologetically honest read about race in the United States. Those who follow Oluo's work have come to expect this sort of realness, whether in her essays on race and identity for Elle and the Washington Post, or in her work at The Establishment, a media outlet created by women that prioritizes marginalized voices, where she is editor at large. Now, in her breakout book, Oluo aims to shift the public discourse toward a more intelligent and...

Last month, Dallas Robinson received an email from someone she didn’t know, asking if she would be open to receiving a large sum of money—with no strings attached. For once, it wasn’t spam. She hit reply. Robinson is a beginning farmer with experience in organic agriculture, and has had plans to establish the Harriet Tubman Freedom Farm on 10 acres of family land near her home in Rocky Mount, North Carolina. Located in an area where the poverty rate hovers at nearly 20 percent, according to...

In December, Premera Blue Cross Blue Shield granted two years of funding to the Alaska Resilience Initiative (ARI) to develop a program to train professionals in recognizing and responding to trauma and adverse childhood experiences (ACEs). The Alaska Resilience Initiative is a statewide organization that brings together a variety of groups and individuals with the goal of ending child maltreatment and systemic trauma. The ARI works to develop solutions to systemic trauma in Alaska while...

“The moments when people need us the most are the moments when we have to be found,” said Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti last Wednesday afternoon to a crowd of lawyers, judges, law students, and others who had gathered in a large courtyard at the bright-colored Frank Gehry-designed Loyola Law School campus. “Today we’re offering a [helping] hand to our fellow human beings and saying, ‘We will be there for you,'” Garcetti said to the crowd. The mayor was at Loyola to celebrate the official...

If you haven't heard or read about this new memoir, I highly recommend exploring it. I haven't read the book yet but plan to right away - I heard the author Tara Westover on Fresh Air and just read a thoughtful piece about it on Longreads (link here: An Education in Doubt . The author survived a childhood full of family violence with a mentally ill father - there's much more to it, but I think it sounds well worth reading from the perspective of ACEs and reslience.

If cops provided first aid to individuals they shoot, regardless of the reason for the shooting, would that change the festering hostility towards law enforcement in America’s at-risk communities? Soon after the fatal police shooting of an unarmed black man in Tulsa last September , a Los Angeles officer told criminologist Lawrence Sherman that SWAT teams in his city were trained to provide immediate medical help to anyone injured during police actions—even those shot by police themselves.

After last week’s school shooting in Parkland, Florida, the young survivors underwent a routine that has become all too familiar: Teams of crisis counselors were dispatched , vigils and funerals were held, and local officials debated what to do about the physical aftermath of the massacre: inspecting the school’s buildings and deciding when (and if) the campus would re-open for classes. The psychological damage may be harder to assess. Among kids exposed to traumatic violence, short-term...

Humans tend to normalize behaviors of close intimates, tucking certain responses and behaviors into folders labeled “Just the way he is” or “So typical of her.” We do that because, in the moment, we chose to stay in the relationship, even though the sailing isn’t always smooth; some of the time, we fail to recognize that we’re actually excusing behaviors that should never be tolerated. People with insecure attachment styles whose emotional needs weren’t met in childhood do this more often...

Relapse has always been a harsh reality of addiction, but as the opioid black market fills with powerful synthetics, relapse on heroin and similar drugs grows increasingly dangerous. Fatal overdoses nearly doubled between 2015 and 2016—the majority of which are attributed to opioid-based drugs. We are bombarded daily with news headlines—some factual, some fictitious—announcing the newest therapy, or the latest hysteria-provoking scare (does death by fentanyl dust at the grocery store sound...