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When Dannel Malloy, the Democratic governor of Connecticut, entered Germany’s Heidering Prison two years ago this summer, he saw something more akin to an American college dormitory than a detention center. Heidering rejects the idea that prisons should aim to punish, and permits even convicted murderers to cook their own food, lock their own cells, and leave to see their families on weekends. Germany “can actually call their [prisons] a corrections system as opposed to our penal system,”...

Epidemics are hard to cover. Navigating the gaps between the private, personal, and societal and managing to be relatable while also true to science is a tough part of health reporting, generally. Doing those things in the middle of public panic—and its attendant misinformation—requires deftness. And performing them while also minding the social issues that accompany every epidemic means reporters have to dig deep, both into multiple disciplines and into ethics. With multiple competing...

Harsh life experiences appear to leave African-Americans vulnerable to Alzheimer's and other forms of dementia, researchers reported Sunday at the Alzheimer's Association International Conference in London. Several teams presented evidence that poverty, disadvantage and stressful life events are strongly associated with cognitive problems in middle age and dementia later in life among African-Americans. The findings could help explain why African-Americans are twice as likely as white...

http://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2017/07/16/536935957/stress-and-poverty-may-explain-high-rates-of-dementia-in-african-americans

"You are absolutely not doomed from having ACEs."

A bipartisan resolution “Recognizing the importance and effectiveness of trauma-informed care” ( H. Res. 443 ) was introduced in the U.S. House of Representatives on July 13 by Mike Gallagher (R-WI) and co-sponsor Danny K. Davis (D-IL). The impetus for the resolution resides with the First Lady of Wisconsin, Tonette Tonette Walker Walker, who has taken a strong leadership role in advancing trauma-informed policy and practice statewide through Fostering Futures and of late with the new...

“What happened to you?” isn’t just a question for therapists to ask their troubled clients. It’s a question that should inform the work of physicians, nurses, lawyers, educators, social workers and public health advocates from the time they are learning their professions to each real-world encounter. That’s the hope of the Philadelphia ACE Task Force (PATF) , whose workforce development group released a toolkit to help faculty across a range of disciplines weave content on adverse childhood...

So, the St. Pauls School in NH is under investigation again. Apparently, there is a new tradition involving sexual misconduct and notches on a crown from a fast food restaurant. An investigation is ongoing but often, when there is smoke, there is fire. I find the whole situation unbelievable as an educator. How does a place that graduated Owen Labrie (convicted of participating in Senior Salute) and then issued a report in May 2017 (not a typo) about decades of abuse find themselves with a...

In the late 1960s, a team of researchers began doling out a nutritional supplement to families with young children in rural Guatemala. They were testing the assumption that providing enough protein in the first few years of life would reduce the incidence of stunted growth. It did. Children who got supplements grew 1 to 2 centimetres taller than those in a control group. But the benefits didn't stop there. The children who received added nutrition went on to score higher on reading and...

Back in the 1970s, a handful of psychotherapists and theorists radically altered the way clinicians viewed and helped emotionally troubled kids. Innovators like Salvador Minuchin, Jay Haley, and Urie Bronfenbrenner audaciously suggested that the existing modes of therapy, still predominantly Freudian in perspective, simply weren't working, and they proposed what would be a complete rethinking of child and family mental health. So influential were these thinkers that their basic ideas seem...

Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) has always been associated with mental health, but new research suggests there's a physical aspect to it too – that a certain area of the brain is larger in people suffering from PTSD. That means we could improve the way we detect and treat the debilitating condition by looking at physical as well as psychological signs, giving doctors something outside the mind that they can study. The research focussed on the left and right amygdalae , those parts of...

Experiencing physical, sexual or emotional abuse as a child, or other stresses such as living in a household affected by domestic violence, substance abuse or mental illness, can lead to higher levels of health service use throughout adulthood. A research paper in the Journal of Health Service Research & Policy provides, for the first time, the statistical evidence showing that, regardless of socio-economic class or other demographics, people who have adverse childhood experiences use...