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I’ve accomplished a lot in my life. But deep inside, I feared I was merely impersonating a normal woman. Here’s how the greatest impersonator in SNL history helped me accept myself — trauma and all.

By K. Hecht, P. Berman & A. Hosack I still don’t want to talk about my mean dad. No one can make me talk about him. Davy is sitting at the small table with crayons again. His mom and Dr. Berman are sitting on each side of him. In the middle of the table is the totally black scary thing Davy and his mommy drew yesterday. Davy cried a lot yesterday and was able to avoid talking about his daddy. But now they are back. His mommy has that firm look on her face- that’s the face that means he...

The Failure of Functionalism The current service model that has been employed by mental health systems can best be described as “functionalism,” a term generally employed in medical sociology to denote a service model that views illness or disability as a deviance that must be corrected. The individual is subsumed beneath the disability category and her/his ability to “model” what is “normal” becomes the standard for service delivery and individual assessment. Mental health services have...

By Kevin Sullivan, Valerie Strauss and Emily Davies, The Washington Post, August 6, 2019 Connor Betts, 24, who shot and killed nine people in Dayton, Ohio, before police killed him, was a deeply troubled young man. He had a history of violence against girlfriends and fantasized about murder, keeping a “hit list” of people he wanted to target. High school classmates said that school officials were aware of his behavior years ago, and that as a freshman, he was missing from school for months...

By Jack Healy and Julie Bosman, The New York Times, August 8, 2019 David Morrison carries the scars of Ferguson’s upheaval. A veteran protester, he has fled gunshots and tear gas, marched, waved signs and played dead on the asphalt in years of activism that unspooled after a white police officer killed an unarmed black teenager named Michael Brown. “I’m so angry!” he shouts. He is 7 years old. This is the inheritance of Ferguson’s children. Five years after they lay in bed listening to...

By Wendy Sawyer, Witness LA, July 30, 2019 Given the dramatic growth of women’s incarceration in recent years, it’s concerning how little attention and how few resources have been directed to meeting the reentry needs of justice-involved women. After all, we know that women have different pathways to incarceration than men, and distinct needs, including the treatment of past trauma and substance use disorders, and more broadly, escaping poverty and meeting the needs of their children and...

https://www.drugabuse.gov/about-nida/noras-blog/2019/06/importance-prevention-in-addressing-opioid-crisis

By Dianne Gallagher, Catherine E. Shoichet and Madeline Holcombe, CNN, August 8, 2019 After immigration authorities rounded up hundreds of workers in a massive sweep at seven Mississippi food processing plants, friends and family members are desperately searching for answers. A crowd waited outside a plant in Morton, Mississippi, on Thursday morning, hoping authorities would release their loved ones. Many had been by later in the afternoon. Video footage from CNN affiliates and Facebook live...

By Margarita Tartakovski, PsychCentral, July 9, 2019 It’s safe to say that most of us would love more joy in our lives, particularly when it feels like the hours blend together into one big blur, and we find ourselves feeling blah. Yet, do you know what brings you joy? Sometimes, we can get so swept up in the daily hustle that we forget to ask ourselves this question—and we have no idea about the answer. [ Please click here to read more .]

By Anna Tingeley, Variety, August 5, 2019 The doc, captured by director Michelle Esrick, portrays the ‘Saturday Night Live’ star’s decades-long struggle with substance abuse, self-harm and misdiagnoses as he rose to fame on the iconic sketch show. Known for his iconic impersonations of Sean Connery, Regis Philbin and former President Bill Clinton, Hammond held the record for the longest tenure on the show (14 seasons) until he was surpassed by Kenan Thompson in 2017. Despite the years of...

Recorded live August 8, 2019. Find the slides attached below. The 1 hour video recording can be found on our YouTube channel: https://youtu.be/BUyY0FMjv8s Speaker: Elaine Miller-Karas, MSW, LCSW, Executive Director and Co-founder, Trauma Resource Institute. Host: Carey Sipp, Southeast Community Facilitator, ACEs Connection. Webinar Description: This webinar will explore integrating a biological based model to reduce the impacts of toxic stress for children and adults. It is a model both for...

I remember my enthusiasm when I first stumbled upon the ACEs study…In my eagerness to learn as much as I could about the emerging trauma-informed movement, I brought this topic up to as many people as I could to learn more. In one of those conversations, something that a colleague with a school-based mental health background said really struck me: “None of this is new--we have been talking about these concepts in school-based mental health for decades. It’s just new language.”