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By Bror M. Ranum, Lars Wichstrom, and Stale Pallesen, JAMA Network Open, December 27, 2019 Question: What is the long-term and bidirectional association between sleep duration and symptoms of psychiatric disorders in school-aged children? Findings: In this population-based cohort study of 799 Norwegian children participating in the Trondheim Early Secure Study, when all time-invariant confounders and baseline levels of study variables were accounted for, short sleep duration was...

Heather’s history of childhood abuse caught up with her as she began to have chronic pain, auto-immune symptoms, panic attacks, and eventually severe PTSD. Heather experienced a spiritual awakening that led her to two eastern sciences that not only saved her life but shifted her profession and mission.

By Scott McIntosh, Idaho Statesman, December 26, 2019 For the first time, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has put together an analysis of adverse childhood experiences, or ACES, and the potential positive impacts of preventing such experiences. In a study released last month, the CDC concludes that reducing the number of adverse childhood experiences that a child encounters could reduce cases of depression by 44%, or by 21 million cases, reduce heart disease by 1.9 million...

By Eliot Brenner, Stanford Social Innovation Review, March 20, 2019 One in five children in the United States has a diagnosable mental health condition. Unfortunately, access to care for these children is poor: At least 85 percent of those in need of treatment do not get it. More than half of mental illness emerges before age 14, so getting children the help they need, in addition to ameliorating their immediate suffering, can also prevent future pain. The result of not getting help can be...

By Monica Humphries, NationSwell, December 19, 2019 On bookshelves across the country, there are stories about mice and cookies, princesses with long hair and a very hungry caterpillar. But in Arkansas, thousands of children won’t curl up with a parent in bed and listen to a bedtime story. Instead, they’ll listen to a recording of a family member reading them a story. That’s because 16% of children in Arkansas currently or previously have had a parent or guardian incarcerated — the highest...

By jonetta rose barras, The DC Line, December 26, 2019 “I think about the man who works across the street from my house, a lot. I wonder whether he ever feels guilty for only being there to help direct me towards the right aisle whenever I can’t find something in the store on my own. The only conversations we ever have follows a pattern: “hey, did you find everything okay?” // “did you want your receipt in or outside the bag this time? “We never talk about anything else. More importantly we...

Photo caption and credit: Preston Gorman, now living in Austin, was disabled by post-traumatic stress disorder for years after surviving Ebola in 2015. (Ilana Panich-Linsman/for The Washington Post) December 27, 2019 When they wheeled Preston Gorman into a light spring breeze outside the National Institutes of Health nearly five years ago, he was, medically speaking, among the most fortunate people on the planet. Gorman’s doctors had just defeated advanced Ebola virus disease , one of the...

By Felicia Marie Knaul, Flavia Bustreo, and Richard Horton, The Lancet, December 20, 2019 Violence against women and young people is persistent and perverse. Few if any health conditions or risk factors affect such large segments of the global population, and people living in poverty and vulnerable situations, including forced migration and humanitarian emergencies, are especially at risk. More than a third of women and girls—over 1 billion people—experience intimate partner violence or...

By Jugal k> Patel, Tim Arango, Anjali Singhvi, and Jon Huang, Los Angeles Times, December 22, 2019 Homelessness is Los Angeles’s defining crisis. Income inequality, a shortage of housing, failing mental health services and drug addiction all contribute to growing scenes of squalor across America’s second-largest city. The federal government recently estimated that a nearly 3 percent rise in homelessness nationwide this year was driven mostly by California. Yet it does not affect everyone...

By Don Thompson, San Francisco Chronicle, December 27, 2019 An inmate in solitary confinement at a California jail was refusing to leave his cell. The jailers' usual response: Send an “extraction team” of corrections officers to burst into the cell and drag him out. But not in Contra Costa County, one of three in the state using a kinder, gentler approach in response to inmate lawsuits, a policy change that experts say could be a national model for reducing the use of isolation cells. So the...

By Doug Smith, Los Angeles Times, December 27, 2019 With the ranks of homeless people growing faster than housing is being built, one of the most popular strategies for reducing homelessness has become to simply keep people in their homes. In theory, a small infusion of cash, counseling or legal aid could be the difference that prevents someone from ending up on the street. But reality isn’t so simple. Of the tens of thousands of people who are on the brink of losing their homes every year...

By Elizabeth Evans, University of Massachusetts Amherst, December 20 Gender-tailored methods to address the harmful mental health effects of childhood adversity may help alleviate the current opioid crisis and make treatment more effective, concludes University of Massachusetts Amherst epidemiology researcher Elizabeth Evans in her latest research about opioid use disorder (OUD). Looking for new ways to address the public health emergency that the opioid crisis has created, Evans and...