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Dear Children Seeking Asylum in the U.S., These past few days, I have drafted several letters to you, children and youth, who have walked thousands of miles north from your countries of origin to ask for asylum in the United States. I can only imagine the difficult, very difficult, circumstances that your families must have sustained to decide to leave behind everyone they loved, everything they knew and owned and walk into the unknown. In these unfinished letters, I tell you that I think...

On the east side of Indianapolis in late March, a barrage of bullets sprayed through a home, killing 1-year-old Malaysia Robson as she slept on the couch. It was a drive-by shooting in the middle of the night by two men in their late 20s. It’s the kind of violence that can shake a community, leaving its distraught members wondering how much more they can take. Community violence — and other forms of trauma — are especially harmful for children. They’re called adverse childhood experiences...

CONCORD — New survey data shows that half of all New Hampshire adults have experienced at least one “adverse childhood experience,” such as parental drug or alcohol abuse, domestic violence or sexual abuse. And one in 10 individuals reported four or more of these “ACEs,” which studies show are linked to negative health outcomes later in life, including depression, chronic diseases and substance use disorders. State health officials and New Hampshire’s two U.S. senators were on hand Monday at...

December 11, 2018; New York Times In the past two years, progressive district attorneys have been elected in a wide range of cities, note Emily Bazelon and Miriam Krinsky in the New York Times. But will electoral victories be enough to uproot a racialized criminal justice system, which Michelle Alexander has labeled the New Jim Crow , built up over decades? The stakes are high. The data are well known, but the physical and human costs are worth enumerating. The introduction of a new report...

Epigenetics seems to be growing up and facing the inevitable questions that come to a maturing science. A new study of trauma experienced by POWs in the Civil War adds to the evidence that sons (perhaps even grandsons) can inherit the physical effects of that trauma. So naturally, people are asking hard questions about these findings. Sons of Trauma Dying Sooner Dora Costa and colleagues published their findings in Proceedings of the National Academies of Sciences . They studied children of...

Did You Know That 20% of Children Are Suffering With A Mental Health Disorder? Learn How To Spot Depression or Anxiety in Children, What You Can Do, And How To Help By Watching The Replay Of My Interview With Dr. Lorry Leigh Belhumeur, Licensed Psychologist & CEO Of Western Youth Services.

Engaging parents and children in effective trauma treatment can be difficult in the best of circumstances. Conventionally, engagement and rapport building begins in the first face-to-face session. More often than not, it is a harsh set-up. Parents and children may enter the first session angry, frustrated, or hopeless, with their arms tightly crossed. The slightest provocation could open conflict and confrontation between parents and children.

Over the past three decades of global warming, the oldest and thickest ice in the Arctic has declined by a stunning 95 percent, according the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s annual Arctic Report Card . The finding suggests that the sea at the top of the world has already morphed into a new and very different state, with major implications not only for creatures such as walruses and polar bears but, in the long term, perhaps for the pace of global warming itself. The oldest...

Five years ago, nearly 200 elderly lifers were released from prison en masse — people who had been convicted and sentenced before 1981, under jury instructions that were found unconstitutional in the case Unger v. Maryland . It created a natural experiment: Was it safe to release all these one-time violent criminals? Or would they land right back in prison? The results are in, according to a study from Justice Policy Institute (JPI), a Washington-based nonprofit. The Ungers, as they’re...

It's been a year of amazing books that offer new and uplifting insights, creative solutions to current problems, and inspiration for the future. Here are the best of the best. 1. Educated by Tara Westover This memoir is on everyone’s best books of the year list. But why psychology? Through extreme real-life examples of growing up in isolated rural Idaho, Westover offers some great psychological insights into how one’s upbringing shapes our worldview—and the ways in which we might not even...

A thought-aholic is someone who displays an addictive relationship with thinking. In other words, they continue thinking despite the fact that their thoughts are producing the very problems they are trying to think their way out of! Their minds are out of control. The results of this are not very much unlike the consequence of someone who’s drinking alcohol is out of control. Soon, their lives spin out of control. Adverse childhood experiences contribute enormously to though-holism. Our...

WASHINGTON -- The problem of higher morbidity and mortality among black mothers and their infants is one that can and must be solved, several speakers said here Wednesday. "This is one of those truths that must be spoken," Sen. Kamala Harris (D-Calif.) said at an event sponsored by the Center for American Progress (CAP), a left-leaning think tank here. "It is a truth that black women in America are three to four times more likely to die than white women because they choose to become mothers...