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In the high-beamed auditorium at the Clarkston Community Center near Atlanta, a dozen teenagers sit in a circle on metal chairs. Each one sings out his or her name, making the sound musical and adding a dramatic gesture at the request of instructor Ruth Schowalter. Shy participants screw up their courage to become dramatic. The entire group repeats each name and movement, singing the sounds loudly and energetically. Schowalter asks the group to do another exercise. It begins with the words:...

I arrived at the Anamosa Iowa Men’s Reformatory in October 1992. I can still remember riding in the van, wearing a set of cold steel shackles and handcuffs attached to a long dog chain that went around my waist and attached to a black box. The black box was padlocked around the cuffs, immobilizing my hands. I had heard rumors that a prisoner actually invented this black box contraption and I cursed him silently as we took a 2½-hour trip, which seemed more like it took all day. Immobilized in...

To wrap up our series on public health in Baltimore , Audie Cornish met up with Baltimore City Health Commissioner Leana Wen in Freddie Gray's neighborhood of Sandtown-Winchester. The health department recently opened a new outpost of its violence prevention program Safe Streets there, employing ex-offenders to mediate conflicts before they erupt in violence. Wen spoke about pushing a public health agenda in a city that has long struggled with poverty, violence and addiction. She also talked...

Growing up in Iowa, once a summer my dad would pack a tent, sleeping bags, and load up our camper which sat securely on the bed of my dad's pick- up truck. My mom would pack hot dogs to roast, and of course s'mores. We would then head off to a local campground on the shores of Saylorville Lake for an overnight adventure. We laughed as we burned marshmallows, and sometimes my mom even brought her guitar to play for us. This is all, thankfully, I knew of camping until I became an adult living...

Last week's meeting of the Building Community Resilience collaborative provided an opportunity for one of our nation's leading experts on obesity to call attention to ACEs and trauma. Read more from Dr. Bill Dietz at this Huffington Post blog. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/obesity-zip-code-and-adversity-new-action-toward_us_571ea1a5e4b03b93e7e42a69

I have shared my opposition to spanking children to anyone who would listen, including the 2 mothers of my children. While we were married, the mothers didn’t, as far as I was aware, spank our kids. When we divorced, however, the resumed doing what their parents were doing. And a typical response from others was “my parents spanked me and I turned out just fine, so I don’t see anything wrong with it.” As a social science junkie, I look at the research and apply what I feel is common sense...

Unique Trauma-Informed Care Course Coming Soon Making It Real is a unique course- there is nothing else like it. It is NOT a course in which individuals go through the course and get some new knowledge about trauma and how it affects the brain. Those courses are very valuable. But that’s not what this is. Making It Real is a course for a TEAM to IMPROVE THEIR TREATMENT . As a team, you work through it together. You learn from the videos. The Resources enlarge your options and possibilities.

So much for a country built on boundless optimism. More Americans are committing suicide now than at any other time in the last 30 years, according to a new analysis by the National Center for Health Statistics. The NCHS study released last week indicates that the national suicide rate jumped an astonishing 24 percent (to 13 in every 100,000 people) between 1999 to 2014, the highest it’s been since 1986, according to the New York Times . The increase was particularly pronounced among...

A few years back, Destiny Watford was canvassing her Curtis Bay neighborhood in south Baltimore, alerting her neighbors to the potential dangers of a gargantuan trash incinerator planned for their community. At 90 acres, the facility would be one of the largest incinerators in the world, and also one of the dirtiest. It would reportedly spew as much as 1,000 pounds of lead into the air annually, along with 240 pounds of mercury and millions of tons of greenhouse gases. And this would all...

Americans in favor of paid leave are often quick to point out that the United States is one of only two countries that do not have it . That only the U.S. and Papua New Guinea have decided not to make this particular investment in our labor force. Their detractors will be happy to know that this is actually untrue. The U.S. and Papua New Guinea are not the only two countries in the world without paid parental leave, a policy that keeps women in the workforce and adds millions, if not...

For Glenn E. Martin, the fight to close New York City’s Rikers Island is personal. Martin spent a year as an inmate there and served five years in a New York State prison after being convicted of armed robbery. He believes his experience, like that of hundreds of thousands of individuals released every year, provides needed perspective in the growing national call for reform. He also believes New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio could do more. The mayor published an opinion piece this month in...

For more than a decade, Sultan resident Joe Neigel has worked to improve the health of communities throughout Snohomish County using focused, evidence-based strategies meant to help prevent young people from abusing drugs and alcohol. Last year, after nearly 11 years as a prevention coordinator with Snohomish County, Neigel shifted gears and went to work as a prevention specialist for Monroe Public Schools. His decision came on the heels of the county’s announcement it would no longer serve...