Blog

By Matthew Udine, Parkland Talk, January 20, 2020 Last year, I set out to understand how my local community was dealing with the traumatic events that took place on February 14, 2018. In conjunction with Parkland Cares, a local nonprofit organization, I collaborated with the mental health professionals servicing the community and observed elevated levels of isolationism, substance abuse, and other anxiety associated symptoms. During the past holiday season, I spoke with affected students...

By Alexandra Schwartz, The New Yorker, January 20, 2020 On the subject of his vocation, Philip Roth liked to quote Czeslaw Milosz: “When a writer is born into a family, that family is finished.” It’s a great aphorism, pithy and cavalier, as emphatic as a gunshot. To write is to declare a loyalty that runs deeper than blood, to make a pledge to the self and its expression; to write well is to tell the truth about what you have seen, starting with where—and who—you come from. That, anyway, is...

By Larissa Marulli, Moms, January 21, 2020 According to a physiatrist and many studies, painful childhood memories affect us negatively far into adulthood. Issues from childhood affect both our physical and emotional health as we age. A book by psychiatrist Allen Wheelis titled How People Change looks into this phenomenon and gives some much-needed insight. In this book, Wheelis is able to describe childhood events that affected him well into his 60s. Adverse childhood experiences (ACE) have...

Growing Through Disaster, Tools for Financial and Trauma Recovery in Your faith Community In 1984 when my wife died suddenly I experienced my own personal disaster. I knew I could not deal with my loss alone. I was invited to attend a community support group for parents of small children who lost a spouse. I was also able to grow through my grief with the amazing support of my congregation. My next step was to start leading a faith-based support group for people who lost a spouse. Since then...

By Janice Wood, PsychCentral, January 6, 2020 The mere sight of an indoor plant can reduce stress in office workers, according to a new study. While it has been assumed that plant life is soothing to those required to regularly face stressful or mundane situations, the new study “scientifically verifies” the degree of psychological and physiological impact induced by indoor plants, the researchers noted. Researchers Masahiro Toyoda, Yuko Yokota, Marni Barnes, and Midori Kaneko at the...

By The Dickinson Press, January21, 2020 Beach Public Schools is pleased to announce a new partnership with The Village Family Service Center to provide school-based mental health services, thanks to funding from the Burgum Foundation and the Katherine Kilbourne Burgum Family Fund. Torina McConnachie, a licensed counselor with The Village’s Bismarck office, will provide in-house counseling one day a week, either in person at the school or via telemental health services. This includes...

By National Public Radio, January 2020 Menopause Can Start Younger Than You Think: Here's What You Need To Know Would you recognize the signs that your body is going through the big hormonal changes that lead to menopause? Here's what to look for — and what you can do about it. [ Please click here to explore the series .]

By Renee Ryberg, Nadia Orfali Hall, Claire Kelley, Jessica Warren, and Kristen Harper, Child Trends, January 2020 In 2015, an average 15-year-old could expect to live to age 79. However, teens living in the 1 percent of neighborhoods with the lowest life expectancies could expect to live to 70—a lifespan nine years shorter. Educational attainment, a key social determinant of health, is one of the most powerful predictors of life expectancy. This association has strengthened over the past 20...

By Fay Hanleybrown, Lakshmi Iyer, John Kirschenbaum, Sandra Medrano, Aaron Mihaly, FSG, January 2020 Employers of frontline talent face an unprecedented opportunity to advance racial equity as a source of competitive advantage. The United States is experiencing dramatic demographic shifts, its workforce is becoming increasingly racially diverse, and the nature of work is fundamentally changing due to automation. Approximately nine million of the country’s 24 million frontline...

( Download the infographic on our website here . ) With the Harvey Weinstein trial underway, once again the news coverage is bound to churn up emotions for sexual assault survivors as it did during the Brett Kavanaugh confirmation hearings in 2018. During that time, many of the women around me were subdued and anxious, suffering from migraines or coming down with colds. This was not a coincidence - these are just some of the ways trauma reminders can impact us physically and emotionally.

Early Relational Health (ERH) – is an emerging framework that elevates the primacy of relational experiences as foundational for life-long health, learning and social-emotional wellbeing and has relevance across the child and family-focused fields of pediatrics, public health, infant-child mental health, early learning, child welfare and early childhood community systems. Please take 10 minutes to answer this questionnaire, offered by the Center for the Study of Social Policy (CSSP). CSSP's...

By The Nicholson Foundation, January 16, 2020 The New Jersey Funders ACEs Collaborative is seeking to hire an “Executive on Loan” to share their expertise with the State of New Jersey and coordinate statewide efforts to prevent, protect against, and heal from the effects of Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs). The Executive on Loan position will be a two-year contract with the NJ Funders ACEs Collaborative. The Executive on Loan will report to the New Jersey Department of Children and...