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Better data collection, improved efforts to attract juvenile defenders and well-funded, well-organized defense systems are among the ways to ensure youth charged with an offense have a lawyer by their side when they enter a courtroom, a new report says. The National Juvenile Defender Center released an analysis that details how the group believes federal, state and local officials, as well as law schools and others, could help ensure more juveniles have access to legal counsel. The...

The National Association of School Psychologists (NASP) invites you to join us on Wednesday, November 16, 2016 at 9:00 p.m. EDT for a live Twitter chat and discuss how adverse childhood experiences affect children’s well-being. Film director, James Redford (@jred5562) and educational leader, Jim Sporleder (@SporLin ) will co-faciliate this convening to explore strategies used by educators, therapists, pediatricians, and communities to disrupt cycles of violence and trauma. For those...

I feel crushed like a bug under an over-sized, smelly loafer Obliterated. It's familiar. I feel afraid. As someone with post-traumatic stress, I’m used to being afraid. This is different and not different. This isn’t only a symptom or a fresh new feeling that goes with an old memory. This is reality-based fear. This is the Maya Angelou “When someone shows you who they are believe them; the first time” kind of afraid. It’s based on experience, from the election, but also from being a...

More than 5,000 incidents of suicidal behavior were reported in Los Angeles Unified in the last school year, an exponential jump from the 255 reported in 2010-2011 when the district, California’s largest, began tracking such incidents. The cases were cited in the district’s latest Incident System Tracking Accountability Report , or iStar, an annual review of troubling incidents that occurred in district schools during the academic year. The list includes such things as injuries, accidents,...

Donald Trump will take office in January with strong support among veterans, and he’s made reforms to the Department of Veterans Affairs a key part of his platform. When it comes to one of the biggest health issues facing vets — that of mental health and post-traumatic stress disorder — there’s a lot more to be done. Trump hasn’t spoken about the subject much. Last month he told a gathering of veterans that his team would be “addressing … very strongly” the issue of suicides among veterans,...

Humans are hardwired to interact with others, especially during times of stress . When we go through a trying ordeal alone, a lack of emotional support and friendship can increase our anxiety and hinder our coping ability. This message is driven home in the newly-released thriller Shut In . Naomi Watts plays a widowed child psychologist who lives in isolation in rural New England with her son, who is comatose and bedridden as the result of an automobile accident. Snowed in and withdrawn from...

In a bright room at Robert W. Coleman Elementary School in Baltimore, a group of kids sit around the edge of a colorful checkerboard rug. They close their eyes, and an instructor walks them through a belly breathing exercise. Technically, they’re there because they acted out: they got in a scuffle on the playground, or spoke out of turn in class. But this is not detention: the Mindful Moment Room is Robert W. Coleman Elementary’s attempt to break the entrenched cycle of disruption and...

Over 5 million kids in the United States currently have or have had a parent in prison. That works out to about one in 14 American children—a majority of whom are under age 10. Broken down by state, children with incarcerated parents can represent 3 to 13 percent of the population, according to “ A Shared Sentence ,” a report by the Annie E. Casey Foundation. The unusually intense stress that these children face has been well documented and studied. That’s mostly due to researchers’ emphasis...

The share of U.S. mothers who spank their young children or endorse physical discipline has declined significantly over the past two and a half decades, according to an analysis of four national surveys. The findings , out Monday in the journal Pediatrics, came from an analysis of data from 1988 to 2011. Researcher found that 21 percent of median-income mothers of kindergarten-aged children endorsed physical discipline at the end of that period — down from 46 percent at the start. "There's...

There are no simple answers for adolescent reentry adolescents. Many of them shouldn't have been forced to go through it to begin with, as they were sent to juvenile lockup facilities for status offenses. I've done a great deal of work with reentry teens, and have found that it usually takes a good month or longer to deinstitutionalize them. They're essentially experiencing shell shock as they come back from a very rigid environment where they are literally told when they can eat, have...

Last week the government released the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Suicide Prevention Evaluation Project report, which gave recommendations to reduce the high rate of suicide among Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people. Minister for Indigenous affairs Nigel Scullion said the government welcomed the report with a very heavy heart . And it is with a heavy heart I write this response. There are many factors contributing to Indigenous suicide, occurring in a wide variety of...

As the tragic pace of military suicides continues across the United States, as profiled in the TEGNA series ‘ Charlie Foxtrot ’,multiple organizations formed to combat the problem, often staffed by veterans themselves, continue to grow in North Texas. They are battle lines that Charles McKinney wishes had been drawn more aggressively back in 2007. McKinney doesn’t think his son Master Sgt. Jeffrey McKinney would have had a chance even if he’d made it home alive from his final tour in Iraq.