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I became a professional reader long before I was a writer when I was living in homeless shelters, subsidized housing, and welfare hotels with my mother in New York City. Most of the middle class and affluent black folks I would come to know in the future would wince and give me a look I couldn’t read when I would tell the story that I outline in my new memoir, The Beautiful Darkness: A Handbook for Orphans . All some intolerant, ignorant bigots need is to continue to hear about the...

In New York, one in five people —around 1.6 million—struggle with mental illness. A new program launched this week aims to give each of them a way to do something about it. NYC Well , part of New York’s $850 million comprehensive mental health plan , ThriveNYC , makes free, round-the-clock counseling available via phone, text, or online chat;conversations with trained counselors are confidential and accessible in over 200 languages. [For more of this story, written by Ellie Anzilotti, go to ...

Jackie has decided to be an ice-cream cone. And why not? Who doesn't love ice cream? Carolyn is going to be a puppy. One of her favorite words so far is "woof," so this makes sense, totally. We have two superheroes this year. Superman is Milo; his cousin Spider-Man is Leo — in case you've been wondering about the super-super-secret identities of these champions for justice. Clayton — at age 8, the eldest grandson — will terrorize younger children as the Grim Reaper. Or not. He is the...

People fleeing big coastal cities like L.A. and San Francisco in search of more affordable housing inland could be in for sticker shock. A new report released Tuesday reveals that inland, rural parts of California are increasingly unaffordable too. "That came as a big surprise because historically we have thought of the housing problem as being a focus in larger cities, but we found every city has this problem," said Jonathan Woetzel, director of the McKinsey Global Institute and a co-author...

As a graduate student at Harvard in the mid-1990s, I participated in research studies carried out by the psychology department that began in October 1996 and continued until August 2005 to interview adults who had experience sexual abuse as children and learn what effects the abuse had had on their lives. Although I was sure I knew what I would discover—that the abuse would be remembered as a horrible experience that overwhelmed the people I interviewed with fear when it happened and had...

Dustin French, 29, had four drug overdoses in the span of a year. “I was dead on arrival to the hospital,” he said of his last heroin overdose, which happened in April. “I woke up … and I didn’t feel like myself. I could tell this time I was really dead.” Now, he says, he’s 100 days clean. He lives with his girlfriend. And he has three sons: an 8-year-old, a 2-year-old and a 1-year-old. He credits his turnaround to a relationship he launched in the emergency department with a “peer recovery...

A report being released this morning paints a staggering picture of a quickly growing Skid Row population. Women living on the streets are increasing in number and are older compared to past years, according to the study. More than 90% of surveyed Skid Row women also have experienced physical or sexual violence in their lifetime. “The report has a range of findings, but it is clear that targeting services and dollars to specific groups of homeless people is what gets to the root of the...

A recent wave of popular historical scholarship on slavery and racism has swept the non-fiction landscape. One valuable new voice here is Sowande’ Mustakeem , whose debut book, Slavery at Sea: Terror, Sex, and Sickness in the Middle Passage , charts the human history of the Atlantic slave trade. Most people are familiar with the famous diagram of the Brookes slave ship, published by British abolitionists in 1788. The simple, two-dimensional engraving depicts cross-sections of the slave ship...

Few things are more awesome than listening to kids playing on the playground. There’s magic in that mix of laughter and exhausted breaths — giggle, pant, giggle. Just the other Saturday at Maplewood’s Memorial Park, I was watching my five-year-old playing with his friends from daycare. The kids have just started kindergarten and are now split up among four schools. Some industrious mom had the idea to get them together again. It was a great idea. It was also the moment when I saw the messy...

Hi everyone! So glad to have found you all. (I'm still learning my way around so apologies if I've posted this in a few places.) I'm Alison Morris, single adoptive mother to a child with early developmental trauma whose ACEs score is sadly quite high. Even more sad is that I think my own parenting may have added a check or two since I had no idea what was going on for quite a while, and even when I did I found it SO hard to parent in a trauma-informed (connection- and relationship-based)...

When we look at childhood trauma we cannot ignore the social and historical context in which children and families exist. This year’s Changing the Paradigm conferences takes on the issue of social and historical trauma, especially racial trauma, and with a team of experts from around the country will endeavor to create a safe space to talk about the impact of social and historical trauma on the communities we live in, as well as to showcase strategies that offer hope of community-level...

Nice article about the state education system's growing apprecation about trauma and ACEs. http://www2.ljworld.com/news/2016/oct/25/kansas-works-understand-trauma-impact-students/