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The experience of natural spaces, brimming with greenish light, the smells of soil and the quiet fluttering of leaves in the breeze can calm our frenetic modern lives. It's as though our very cells can exhale when surrounded by nature, relaxing our bodies and minds. Some people seek to maximize the purported therapeutic effects of contact with the unbuilt environment by embarking on sessions of forest bathing , slowing down and becoming mindfully immersed in nature. But in a rapidly...

At a time when inner cities are facing mounting pressure to preserve affordable housing, the nation’s 1 million public housing apartments are at a critical turning point, with aging properties, a multi-billion dollar backlog of deferred maintenance, declining federal funds and pressures from private-sector developers who are salivating at the chance to buy them out. And yet, for every shocking evening news story of public housing’s moldy apartments or leaking roofs, there are thousands of...

Gun violence has killed nearly 1,200 children in the United States since the school massacre in Parkland, Florida, one year ago. Few of these deaths became the focus of the nation’s attention. Maybe that’s because these killings were so mundane, so normal, in the 21st-century United States. A few weeks after the Parkland shooting, a 17-year-old high-school student in Birmingham, Alabama, named Courtlin Arrington, who’d long dreamed of becoming a nurse , was shot and killed in class, just...

When a white person kills a black man in America, the killer often faces no legal consequences. In one in six of these killings, there is no criminal sanction, according to a new Marshall Project examination of 400,000 homicides committed by civilians between 1980 and 2014. That rate is far higher than the one for homicides involving other combinations of races. In almost 17 percent of cases when a black man was killed by a non-Hispanic white civilian over the last three decades, the killing...

As a child growing up in Pueblo, Colorado, Jeremy Laintz travelled widely with his father, an aeronautics engineer at Lockheed Martin, who sometimes took his four kids along on business trips. Family vacations included tours of aerospace facilities and, on one occasion, a trip to watch a space-shuttle launch at Cape Canaveral. Laintz’s mother managed a bakery, and Laintz, the youngest child in the family, recalled enjoying a warm home life. He played soccer and football, and spent summers...

In January of 2016, Cathryn Townsend set out to live among "the loveless people." So named by anthropologist Colin Turnbull, the Ik are a tribe of some 11,600 hunter-gatherers and subsistence farmers living in an arid and harsh mountainous region of Uganda. Turnbull studied the Ik in the 1960s and famously characterized them as "inhospitable and generally mean" in his book The Mountain People. He documented how young children were abandoned to starve and how people would snatch food from the...

Homeownership in the US has long been stratified by race. The most recent figures from the US Census Bureau (as of September 30, 2018) find that nationwide the white homeownership rate is 73.1 percent compared to a Black homeownership rate of 41.7 percent. One impact of this disparity is that wealth among white people is 10 times higher than it is among Latinxs and 13 times greater than the median Black household . What to do about those statistics is the focus of a recent interview...

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Last November, the California Department of Managed Care gave its stamp of approval to a new version of Whole Child Assessment 2.0 , a tool that screens for children’s adverse childhood experiences (ACEs). It was recommended as part of recently passed legislation calling for trauma screening for children in California. But the Whole Child Assessment 2.0 (WCA) does more. It also queries patients about other critical safety and health issues, including whether they have enough to eat, whether...

[Editor's note: Dr. Harise Stein at Stanford University edits a web site -- abuseresearch.info -- that focuses on the health effects of abuse, and includes research articles on ACEs. Every month, she will post the summaries of the abstracts and links to research articles that address only ACEs. Thank you, Harise!! -- Jane Stevens] Sofer D. The Lifelong Reverberations of Toxic Stress. Am J Nurs. 2019 Jan;119(1):22-23. PMID: 30589695 Concise, easily readable two-page explanation of toxic...

Dear Members of the Native American Group -- As the attached notice describes, on April 4 th and 5 th , a coalition of national and local organizations will host a trauma-informed conference in Window Rock Arizona on the Navajo Reservation. The goal is to promote the implementation of trauma-informed programs on reservations in the Four Corners area, with a particular focus on education, health care, and law enforcement/courts. Called the Four Corners Warrior Spirit Conference and Ceremony,...

As I wait for my first guest, I wonder what sort of characters would sign up for this. “This” is LokPal—a local cooking workshop, premised on strangers “sharing a meal and sharing a bond.” Then Abby arrives, wearing cherry-red lipstick as bright as her smile. As I hand over her name tag and prepare to ask the usual barrage of small-talk questions, Abby makes the first move, deftly breaking the ice with tales of her kindergarten classroom. [For more on this story by Julia Hotz, go to...