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In a small conference room at Detroit Medical Center’s Sinai Grace Hospital , violence intervention specialist Ray Winans asks a roomful of young African Americans if they know anyone who has been killed by gunshots. They all raise their hands, including Winans and his partner, Calvin Evans. They’ve also lost friends, family members. “Five… six… seven,” says one, trying to remember. The young men are participants in the fledgling program D.L.I.V.E., pronounced D-Live—like “Live from New...

There are certain words — large, beautiful, buoyant words — weighed down by a heavy religious inheritance that make the nonreligious among us uneasy. Soul is one of them — a word whose secular redemption is more needed than ever . (Redemption, it occurs to me, is another — one which David Foster Wallace successfully secularized .) But hardly any word is more unnerving yet more urgently needed today than mercy — a word steeped in scripture yet almost biologically encoded into human nature; a...

If 2017 has been an unusually busy year for you, I can totally relate! But for survivors of abuse, a hectic schedule isn’t something out of the ordinary. Too often it’s the norm. An important milestone on your healing journey will be the realization that you’re ready to step off this hectic hamster wheel. If you’re tired of living in reaction mode, dashing from sunrise to sunset each day, trying to catch up but never achieving that goal, good for you! The desire to end your frantic pace is a...

Research has long established that the first 1,000 days after conception (about 280 days until birth and then up to 24 months of age) significantly influence a person’s overall life expectancy and risk for chronic diseases. In general, low birth weight has been the primary indicator of early life stress, but this can only measure stress or maternal nutrition up until birth and still falls quite short of a measurement useful for the first 1,000 days. [For more of this story, written by Traci...

A former corporate employee, Goutham Kumar realized that his true calling lay in serving humanity. Meet the man changing lives in Hyderabad. While most of us struggle to stick to our 9-5 work hours, Goutham Kumar’s workday often commences at midnight. The Hyderabad resident and his band of dedicated workers and volunteers are most likely to be found at one of the city’s many function halls collecting leftover food items to be redistributed among the poor and homeless in the city. “Nobody...

Over the last couple years, more and more treatment centers have started saying they specialize in “Trauma Informed Therapies.” I marvel over this, as clearly indigenous to substance abuse, mental health and chronic pain is, in fact, trauma. To better understand the link between trauma and addiction, I collaborated with my colleague and friend Dr. James Flowers, CEO of Driftwood Recovery in Austin, TX. Let’s take a look at this. Larke Huang, Director of the Office of Behavioral Healthcare...

Attorney General Jeff Sessions went to the border city of Nogales, Ariz., last week to announce new instructions to federal prosecutors: bring more—a lot more—criminal cases against illegal border crossers and immigrants in the country without papers. Summoning fiery rhetoric from his years in the Senate as a warrior for tough immigration enforcement, Sessions said he was ready to take the fight to “criminal aliens and the coyotes and the document-forgers” who he warned are seeking “to...

Seat-belt use in the United States rose from 14 percent in 1985 to 84 percent in 2011 thanks, in large part, to a massive ad campaign promoting the practice. Even now, with “buckle up” warnings far less prominent, seat-belt use continues to rise . Ronald Ferguson wants to see a similar trend with the use of five evidence-based parenting principles dubbed the Boston Basics : maximize love, manage stress; talk, sing, and point; count, group, and compare; explore through movement and play; and...

Abstract CONTEXT: Exposure to traumatic events is common in primary care patients, yet health care professionals may be hesitant to assess and address the impact of childhood trauma in their patients. OBJECTIVE: To assess patient preferences for discussing traumatic experiences and posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) with clinicians in underserved, predominantly Latino primary care patients. DESIGN: Cross-sectional study. MAIN OUTCOME MEASURE: We evaluated patients with a questionnaire...

Consider the case of an African American girl, born to a single mother into abject poverty. She was raped at age 9, and pregnant at 14. Or think about a young Latina, the child of an alcoholic father and a depressed mother. This girl developed diabetes at age 8 and lost her father the following year. You might think neither girl had much hope of success. Yet the first child grew up to be entertainment mogul Oprah Winfrey; the second, Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor. [For more of this...

Viral videos are not new. Every few weeks, something will be posted in a forum such as YouTube or Facebook; a few friends will share the video with one another, and then suddenly, that video is being watched by millions. The most recent viral video takes this to a new level. April the Giraffe was not just a video, it was a live camera streaming online, allowing viewers to watch a pregnant giraffe and ultimately watch the birth of her calf. So, what makes the viral giraffe cam different than...

In a video on the Resilient KC website, police officer Mikki Cassidy notes that “my regular day is everybody else’s worst day.” Then she describes how mindfulness training has helped her find peace amid the clamor: “This moment, right here, I’m okay.” Later in the clip, Sonia Warshawski, a Holocaust survivor, recalls being shoved onto a train to Treblinka and, later, losing her mother to the gas chamber. “One of my highest points is when I speak in schools, when students tell me, ‘You...