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During one of my manic episodes, I was convinced there was a conspiracy against me. Everyone was manipulating my surroundings to create a narrative I couldn’t figure out. I wanted to know who was in charge. I also wanted to know who was safe. I texted my pastor at the time to see if he could meet with me. I drove to the bar next to our church on a hot June afternoon and met him at one of the tables outside. I tried to tell him my concerns, but he dismissed me and said, “Let’s just pray.” He...

Iowa, by some measures, seems like a great place to have a baby. It ranks eighth for overall care in United Health Foundation’s new study of women and children’s health care, which looks at things like birth weight and a mother and child’s neighborhood to assign scores. Except there’s something else you probably want to know before having a baby in Iowa: The state ranks 22nd for infant care, which is dramatically lower than its rank of seventh for women’s health care. (To calculate a state’s...

At Cherokee Point Elementary School, first-grade teacher Hagit Patolai roams her classroom to asses student progress on a “fact versus opinion” writing assignment. She crouches down to read over the shoulder of a boy, asking him to point to the words (beautiful and cool) that indicate his illustrated story about a rainbow is based on his opinions. Why are people’s opinions important, she asks. It’s a question that gets at more than the lesson at hand. Patolai keeps detailed records on the...

As violent crime in Chicago continues to soar, University of Chicago Medicine Comer Children’s Hospital announced it’s creating a new program to treat families and children affected by violence. The program will provide screening and mental health care for hundreds of residents affected by violence in many of Chicago’s South and West Side neighborhoods. It's being called the University of Chicago Medicine Recovery and Empowerment After Community Trauma (UCM REACT). “Chicago’s struggles with...

At a campaign rally in 1976, Ronald Reagan introduced the welfare queen into the public conversation about poverty: “She used 80 names, 30 addresses, 15 telephone numbers to collect food stamps, Social Security, veterans’ benefits for four nonexistent deceased veteran husbands, as well as welfare. Her tax-free cash income alone has been running $150,000 a year.” The perception of who benefits from a policy is of material consequence to how it is designed. For the past 40 years, U.S. welfare...

Dr. Gabor Maté [ LINK HERE ] has garnered headlines in Canada for his early research regarding the possible use of ayahuasca [ LINK HERE ], a plant-derived psychedelic drug from South America, for healing addictions. The results appear meaningful and worthy of consideration by adults with childhood acquired trauma. Dr. Maté has described his reasons for promoting ayahuasca in his blog [LINK HERE ]. He says: “I have witnessed people overcome addictions to substances, sexual compulsion, and...

New research finds a computer-based cognitive-behavioral therapy program can be an effective strategy for treating alcohol use disorders. Yale researcher Kathleen M. Carroll, Ph.D., and other members of the Yale Psychotherapy Development Center created the program called CBT4CBT. The program was created to provide consistent and high-quality delivery of cognitive behavioral therapy skills training to avoid substance use. A new study, published in the journal Alcoholism: Clinical and...

First, a story: Late one night, a man searches for something in a parking lot. On his hands and knees, he crawls around a bright circle of light created by a streetlamp overhead. A woman passes, stops, takes in the scene. "What are you looking for? Can I help?" "My car keys. Any chance you've seen them?" "You dropped them right around here?" "Oh, no. I dropped them way over there," he says, gesturing vaguely to some faraway spot on the other side of the lot. "Then why are you looking here?"...

The hurdles Native American teenagers face in and out of school are daunting. College Horizons, a small organization based in New Mexico, has proven they're not insurmountable. Every year, the group sponsors week-long retreats on college campuses for teenagers from some of the more than 500 federally-recognized tribes in the U.S. One of those retreats was at Lawrence University in Appleton, Wis., where 85 students gathered along with dozens of admissions officers from some of the nation's...

I recoil when I hear the word resilient. It makes me cringe and I don't always understand why. I've been thinking really hard about this topic for two reasons. 1. The word is used all of the time. 2.I'm working on a story about resilience. I'm not trying to convince anyone not to use the word resilient. I just want to share why it is a hot button word for some. Yesterday, I found an example that helps me put this into words. I was reviewing a fascinating study done in 2011 on 746 Danish...

Rutgers University is divided into five residential campuses, and once freshman Imani Hayes figured the system out, she noticed one of them—called Livingston—being referred to as “the black campus.” In part, Hayes found when she began at Rutgers in 2011, that was because Livingston was where the African American studies classes were held. But she said she learned there was another reason: It was one of the cheapest places to live. “If you look at the pictures of the dorms, they were kind of...

High utility bills can be more than a budget-buster. They also can cause anxiety and depression in low-income families, a new study finds. The study included 72 families in the Boston area with annual incomes of $32,000 or less and utility costs that were as much as $650 a month at the height of winter. Utility bills "at $200 per month represent nearly 30 percent of household income for those at or near the federal poverty level, making it a significant, and likely unaffordable, expense,"...