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When Salem Whit walked through the hallways of their high school in Spring Grove, Pennsylvania, overhearing classmates ask one another, “What is that thing?” happened with nearly enough frequency to become background noise. Unlike the sound of lockers slamming, however, comments about Salem’s gender identity were too targeted for the teen to treat them as white noise. “I actually thought I was inhuman,” Salem recalled when thinking about the years of bullying and harassment they experienced...

About 65 people attended a forum on nurturing children who have experienced domestic violence Oct. 11 at University College at Rockland. The event, titled Getting Through to the Other Side: Nurturing and Guiding Children of Domestic Violence, included presentations from Steve Rowe, president and CEO of Maine Community Foundation and a former Maine Attorney General and Speaker of the Maine House of Representatives; and Sue Mackey Andrews, co-founder and co-facilitator of the Maine Resilience...

Planting the Seeds First Lady Michelle Obama planted the White House Kitchen Garden on the South Lawn in 2009. The 2,800 square foot garden provides locally-grown food for the first family and White House guests. What’s more, the garden is a model for how people like you can grow nutritious food at home. Although the White House Kitchen Garden is a recent addition, there is a long tradition of produce-growing at the White House. President John Adams planned the first vegetable garden on the...

Virginia’s first lady and former Washington Redskin Brian Mitchell visited students at a Woodbridge school last week as part of the kickoff of a school-breakfast initiative. Dorothy McAuliffe, wife of Gov. Terry McAuliffe (D), Mitchell and other dignitaries went to Potomac View Elementary School on Tuesday to promote the Virginia Breakfast Challenge, a statewide competition aimed at getting more students to eat breakfast at school. “I’m here because I think — because I’m a mom first — that...

By carefully tracking 5,000 people after they have experienced a traumatic event, a just-launched NIMH-funded study aims to provide a finely detailed map of the array of factors that play a role in the development of mental disorders that occur in the wake of trauma. Information coming out of the study should provide a much deeper understanding of the mechanisms that give rise to post-traumatic disorders as well as a clearer basis for predicting who will be affected and how best to target...

Schools can utilize school-employed mental health professionals, like school psychologists, to support trauma informed services within a Multi-Tiered System of Support (MTSS) framework, although this requires a commitment to improving ratios rather than only hiring community clinicians to provide intensive services to students in need.

Years after leaving her hometown of Santo Domingo to study art and design in the United States, Indhira Rojas was diagnosed with complex PTSD and generalized anxiety disorder. The California-based Dominican’s mental illnesses are rooted in a childhood marked by traumatic abuse. Rojas is not alone. Nearly half of American adults develop a mental illness in their lifetime; depression affects approximately 350 million people worldwide. The struggle to be well, however, is still a shameful...

Kiersten Hawes has been promoted to task force liaison and education coordinator at the Memphis-based ACE Awareness Foundation, which works to inform the community about the negative impact of adverse childhood experiences, or ACEs. Hawes will also continue to serve as a therapist at Universal Parenting Place’s Knowledge Quest location. As the task force liaison, Hawes will engage the foundation board and task force in ongoing dialogue to build awareness around ACEs. Operating in a dual role...

You wouldn’t judge someone for taking medication for a heart condition. So why, asks Amanda Seyfried, would you shame someone with a mental health condition for doing the same thing? The “Ted 2” actress recently opened up to Allure magazine, where she slammed the negative perceptions surrounding psychiatric medication. “ What are you fighting against? Just the stigma of using a tool?” she said. “A mental illness is a thing that people cast in a different category [from other illnesses], but...

There are three discoveries in the last 20 years that, together, point us toward hope for the next generation. First, in the Adverse Childhood Experiences Study (ACEs), conducted by Dr. Vincent Felitti in 1996, we found that the impact of childhood trauma on the biological development of the brain is the most significant determinant of nearly every negative health outcome — behaviorally, mentally, socially, emotionally and physically. In that same study, and many confirming studies, we also...

Racist hiring practices hurt everyone involved. Victimized applicants, obviously, suffer because they are denied jobs based on an attribute unrelated to professional skill. But employers who judge applicants by the color of their skin suffer too. By narrowing the pool of potential hires by race, prejudiced employers are excluding viable applicants, and thus limiting the potential of their business’ strength. A new study from Harvard University, the first of its kind, shows just how much :...

According to a new study, the physical roots of depression are tied to increased functional connectivity between a brain region that is associated with not receiving rewards and punishing events (the lateral orbitofrontal cortex) and an area of the brain involved in someone’s sense of self (the precuneus). This cutting-edge discovery was published today in the journal Brain. For this study, 909 people (421 patients with major depressive disorder and 488 control subjects) had their brains...