Blog

Of the men and women completing a survey of mental health issues in rural Scotland 67 per cent reported suffering depression, 22 per cent admitted to suicidal thoughts and feelings, while of the 12 per cent describing self-harming behaviour the majority were under 24 years old. These were some of the preliminary findings described to this week's meetings of the National Rural Mental Health Forum, and the Scottish Parliament 's Cross Party Group on Rural Policy, by Professor Sarah Skerratt...

I love t his essay by Rebecca Solnit and while it's about the silencing of women, mainly, it's applicable to so many kinds of silence and silencing. One of the reasons I love this network is because it is one of the few places where parents, academics, policy makers and individuals getting and/or providing services are all gathered together and sharing ideas, questions and resources and sharing this cyber space and community. It's so rare. Together, sharing stories and statistics. research...

Angus Deaton studies the grand questions not just of economics but of life. What makes people happy? How should we measure well-being? Should countries give foreign aid? What can and should experiments do? Is inequality increasing or decreasing? Is the world getting better or worse? Better, he believes, truly better. But not everywhere or for everyone. This week, in a speech at a conference held by the National Association for Business Economics, Deaton, the Nobel laureate and emeritus...

Is your baby eating enough, babbling enough, and what does it mean if she still hasn't rolled over when all the other babies in your play group have? New parents spend plenty of time worrying and waiting for milestones to be met. Now to add to the list, a study suggests that behind those sweet, gummy smiles, depression and anxiety may already be lurking. A recent study out of Washington University School of Medicine found there are patterns present in the brain from birth in some children...

Defending children from deportation Alexandra Rizio has long fought for refugees in her professional life, starting as a volunteer with the Refugee and Immigrant Fund in Queens, New York. Today, she is a senior staff attorney at Safe Passage Project, where she also serves as co-coordinator of the Unaccompanied Latin American Minor Project (ULAMP), a collaboration with City University of New York’s John Jay College of Criminal Justice that provides pro bono legal assistance to children in...

This post originally appeared at National Lawyers Guild . In recent weeks, multiple articles have pointed to the wave of new anti-protesting bills introduced in state legislatures since the end of 2016. The Intercept , The Washington Post , AlterNet , Democracy Now! and other news outlets have provided overviews of the types of bills under consideration, the potential chilling effect on protests and the unconstitutional nature of these measures. Because NLG has a long history of protecting...

From prior research, educators and psychologists have long suspected that starting the school day a little later in the morning would greatly benefit students. In America, most secondary school days start between 7:30 and 8:30 am — meaning that children and teens have to get up pretty early each morning to make homeroom on time. The problem is that children — and teenagers especially — forgo sleep in order to make these early start times. Because sleep is so vitally important to both our...

On a summer afternoon in 2009, eight Kaiser Permanente doctors met in Pasadena to review the HMO’s most prescribed drugs in Southern California. Sun blasted through the windows and the room had no air conditioning, but what unsettled the doctors most were the slides a pharmacist was presenting. “We were doing so much work treating people with hypertension and diabetes, we thought those drugs would be on the list,” said Joel Hyatt, then Kaiser's quality-management director in Southern...

A charter school in rural Idaho has found itself in hot water after giving students as young as nine an explicit sexual abuse survey intended for adults. Several outraged parents at Heritage Academy in Jerome have since pulled their children from the school over the graphic questionnaire mentioning anal and oral sex. Some are even considering pursuing legal action in order to bring school officials to account. On February 8, children enrolled in grades one through four at the charter school...

Trauma Transformed's third "Rage, Reflection & Restoration Healing Circle" event will take place in Oakland, CA, on March 15. Information embedded below, and a PDF is attached for download. Trauma Transformed supports the the San Francisco Bay Area Trauma Informed Systems of Care Initiative, which focuses on centralizing and building a regional trauma-informed Bay Area system of care and improving the ways we understand, respond to and heal trauma.

Today is International Women's Day, an appropriate day to take note of and honor the decades of feminist-led research and activism that preceded the ACE study and built the foundation for so much of the trauma and resilience field of work. While the high percentage of people experiencing child sexual abuse may have been unfamiliar to the medical field prior to the ACE study, feminist researchers, anti-violence activists, and community leaders had been studying, writing, and b reaking the...

More states are getting rid of laws that automatically bump teenagers from juvenile courts when they reach a certain age, abandoning a model of punishment proven to be expensive, ineffective and not flexible enough to improve outcomes for offenders or society, a new study says. The Justice Policy Institute focused on national trends and on what it called positive results in states that have most vigorously adopted policies designed to help teenagers and not send them to adult prisons.