In this data snapshot, the Annie E. Casey Foundation examines how placements for young people in foster care have changed from 2007 to 2017. Using data from all 50 states and the District of Columbia, Casey finds that child welfare systems are doing a better job of placing kids in families. At the same time, racial disparities persist for kids of all ages and progress eludes teens in care. To push for further progress, the four-page snapshot tells how states can leverage the federal Family...

The fact that the Kendall County Health Department has office space in the newly-opened police headquarters in Oswego says a lot about how important police think the issue of mental health is, officials said. Oswego Police Chief Jeff Burgner said the office provides another location for the community to consult with a public health staff member but it also benefits the police department. [For more of this story, written by Linda Girardi, go to ...

Tarah Hargrove stands before a massive painting. One side is dominated by grey cinder blocks and stencils of guns. The other by a yellow sky filled with birds. And in the center is a giant portrait of Hargrove, herself. Her chin is lifted, and she looks defiantly at the viewer, magenta radiating from her hair. “So my inner narcissist was like, ‘Yay! My face!” Hargrove said, laughing about her first impression of the four-panel mural painted by University of Alaska Anchorage students. Though...

School counselors and psychologists gathered recently for a day of collaboration and discussion centered around suicide prevention, adverse childhood experiences and trauma-informed care. As the group discussed the impacts of social supports and early intervention, one tool used in the training was the Brain Architecture Game, a tabletop game experience that builds understanding of the role of relationships on early brain development — what promotes it, what derails it with what consequences...

“Smart, Safe, and Fair: Strategies to Prevent Youth Violence, Heal Victims of Crimes, and Reduce Racial Inequality,” published through a collaboration between the Justice Policy Institute (JPI) and the National Center for Victims of Crime (NCVC) addresses how to help youth involved in violent crime — both offenders and victims. Confinement of youth convicted of crimes has decreased; however, violent crime convictions have not. The report shows that confinement of youth is more expensive and...

Advocates often urge the dismantling of the school-to-prison pipeline. But for many of our youth, prisons are already their schools. In 1954, Brown v. Board of Education first demonstrated that “separate but equal” is an unacceptable doctrine within our school system. Yet the doctrine of separate and unequal continues today through the placement of a disproportionate number of minority students and students with disabilities in youth detention facilities, where they receive educational...

Mindfulness is a powerful painkiller that can dramatically enhance the quality of life in chronic pain sufferers, suggests new research. The findings add weight to previous studies which discovered that mindfulness can reduce pain severity by around 50 percent. This new meta-analysis, published in the peer-reviewed journal Evidence-Based Mental Health , analyzed the evidence from 21 previous studies involving 2,000 chronic pain sufferers. It was designed to assess whether mindfulness was as...

Exactly six years ago this week, I wrote a post, “ The Neurobiology of Grace Under Pressure, ” which offered some practical advice on different ways to increase parasympathetic activation within the autonomic nervous system (which counterbalances fight-or-flight responses) by engaging the vagus nerve . One section of that 2013 post recommended practicing Loving-Kindness Meditation (LKM) . Typically, during LKM you systematically direct warm-hearted thoughts of love and kindness to four...

Mindfulness meditation has long been touted as a way to reduce stress and pain. More recently, it also has gained traction as a tool to improve our relationships, helping us to be more kind and less biased and angry when we regularly practice it. Yet when we talk about mindful meditation, often we are thinking about a combination of practices that have been taught together for millennia. These might include breath awareness—focusing on your breath and letting thoughts and feelings pass by...

The votes are in! America voted in potentially record numbers yesterday for a midterm election season. As a result, control of the House of Representatives has changed, 20 states will have new governors, and myriad ballot initiatives were approved and rejected. Following are some initial notes from Youth Services Insider on how yesterday’s elections could affect youth and family policy on the federal and state levels. Congress The biggest outcome of the midterms is that the leadership of...

He's channeled presidents and other luminaries, but on Nov. 14, master impressionist Darrell Hammond will reveal his greatest role: himself. A documentary by director Michelle Esrick based on Hammond's life as a childhood trauma survivor: Cracked Up will premiere that evening at DOC NYC. One screening is already sold out; a second has been added. Hammond wrote about his struggles overcoming a terribly traumatic childhood and his resulting addiction in the New York Times best selling God if...

In the first two installments of this series, we addressed promising approaches for buffering the impact of racism on health—learning cognitive and emotional strategies, known as self-regulation , for coping with stress and building cultural connections that buffer the impacts of toxic stress. Both of those arenas are born out of social science research showing a connection between these elements and improved health outcomes, even in the face of significant adversity. But these individual...

In Philadelphia, a battle between local officials and the Trump administration is heating up. In defiance of threats from the Justice Department, public health advocates in Philadelphia have launched a nonprofit to run a facility to allow people to use illegal drugs under medical supervision. It is the most concrete step yet the city has taken toward eventually opening a so-called supervised injection site. The non-profit, called Safehouse, was formed after a political heavyweight, former...

Months after appointing its first minister for loneliness, Britain named a minister for suicide prevention as part of a new push to tackle mental health issues. Prime Minister Theresa May on Wednesday announced the appointment of the health minister Jackie Doyle-Price to the new role. She will lead government efforts to cut the number of suicides and overcome the stigma that prevents people with mental health problems from seeking help. While suicide rates have dropped in recent years, about...

Consider, for a moment , this story I recently discovered in court transcripts. A paternal grandmother living in New York City learns that her 1-year-old grandson is in Michigan’s foster care system. Days after the child’s removal, she immediately contacts the child’s foster care worker, travels to Michigan, attends the court hearing and requests that the child be placed with her, instead of strangers. It turns out that she raised the child for the first few months of his life, and the...

There’s a small burst of air that explodes from every clap. And when hundreds of people are clapping in unison, it begins to feel like a breeze—one that was pulsing through the Phelps Stokes Chapel at Berea College in Kentucky. The students and staff that had gathered here were stomping, clapping, and singing along, as they were led in a rendition of the Civil Rights era anthem, “Ain’t Gonna Let Nobody Turn Me Around.” They had packed into the wood-framed building for a convocation address,...

This newsletter is about listening to those with lived experience. So what is lived experience? For us at Trauma Informed Oregon (TIO), lived experience means you have personal experience in what you are talking about. As you will see in the blogs, firsthand experience can be as a service recipient, a provider, and a survivor. Trauma informed care (TIC) calls out the need to include the voices of those with lived experience, but why? The intention is simple—we will be more effective and...

It began with the mesmerizing spectacle of dominoes falling: Harvey Weinstein, Kevin Spacey, Louis C.K., Charlie Rose, Matt Lauer, Russell Simmons, and so on, name after famous face, all disgraced by the end of November, 2017. An autumn later, #MeToo is undergoing a shift. Perhaps this is the moment that #MeToo stops being a movement aimed primarily at punishing individuals and starts to do its work on the institutions that have enabled them. The institutions do not collapse into...

Today, it was my third patient of the morning: a woman with a history of childhood sexual abuse and an abusive marriage. She shared with me her distress, her escalating nightmares and flashbacks over the past week. She held out her left arm to me, where for the first time since her adolescence, she had started cutting herself. And then my sixth patient struggled unsuccessfully to tolerate a Pap smear, as her anxiety became unbearable. Yesterday, it was my fourth patient, with a history of...

Cristina Rivell has been struggling with an opioid addiction since she was a teenager — going in and out of rehab for five years. The most recent time, her doctor prescribed her a low dose of buprenorphine (often known by its brand name, Suboxone), a drug that helps curb cravings for stronger opioids and prevents the symptoms of withdrawal. As the devastating effects of the opioid crisis continue, a growing body of research supports the efficacy and safety of this sort of medication-assisted...

The Global Climate Action summit in San Francisco began on Wednesday. This year’s goal: “Take Ambition to the Next Level.” What is that next level? As part of the We Are Still In , Mayors Climate Alliance , and other city climate-action efforts, many U.S cities are creating their first ever climate-action plans; others are rewriting theirs to meet more ambitious goals. The next level is ensuring that these multi-year plans integrate equity considerations or risk perpetuating an unjust life...

Our nation’s future vitality depends upon all children having the opportunity to grow into healthy, successful, socially and civically engaged adults. Essential to that process is ensuring that children have access to stable, nurturing relationships and the resources needed to support their development. The Family First Prevention Services Act , which was signed into law as part of the Bipartisan Budget Act on February 9, 2018, is an important step toward realizing this goal. For child...

Updated September 2018: According to the most recent Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System (BRFSS) data, adult obesity rates now exceed 35% in seven states, 30% in 29 states and 25% in 48 states. West Virginia has the highest adult obesity rate at 38.1% and Colorado has the lowest at 22.6%. The adult obesity rate increased in Iowa, Massachusetts, Ohio, Oklahoma, Rhode Island and South Carolina between 2016 and 2017, and remained stable in the rest of states. [For more go to ...

With two maternal mental health bills on the California governor’s desk and one already signed , a Los Angeles hospital’s work to screen new mothers for depression could soon become a statewide model. Cedars-Sinai in Los Angeles worked hard to bring up its low rate of screening postpartum women for depression. If signed, one of the new bills would require obstetric teams to do the same. The hospital’s screening success is largely due to the dogged persistence of clinical psychologist Eynav...

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Approximately 27 percent of formerly incarcerated people are looking for a job, but are still unemployed, a rate higher even than the general U.S. unemployment rate of 24.9 percent during the Great Depression, according to a new study by the Prison Policy Initiative . According to PPI, the statistic is the first-ever national estimate of unemployment among formerly incarcerated Americans. Researchers used data for 2008—the most recent year for which data was available—to calculate the...

Rates of anxiety and depression among teens in the U.S. have been rising for years. According to one study , nearly one in three adolescents (ages 13-18) now meets the criteria for an anxiety disorder, and in the latest results from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's Youth Risk Behavior Survey, 32 percent of teens reported persistent feelings of sadness or hopelessness. And there's more bad news, grown-ups: The authors of two new parenting books believe you're part of the...

Raise the banners and strike up the band, because the “ War on Poverty” is won . Mission accomplished! And that means it’s time to hack down the safety net that saved the nation’s poor. That was the head-turning takeaway from a report last week from the White House Council of Economic Advisors that declared the War on Poverty “largely over and a success.” The report diverged sharply from what even other Republicans say about poverty, to say nothing of economists. (“Do these people ever visit...

More than a decade after Jim Wallace moved into a small mobile home community in Duvall, Washington, he said the landlord threatened to sell the property and possibly make everyone leave. Wallace had been living there since 1982. He didn’t want to move. He also didn’t think he could afford to. If he tried to move his 14-foot, single-wide mobile home, it “would fold up like a cardboard box,” he said. Wallace didn’t own the land he was on; like his neighbors, he was renting it. Leaving the...

Julie Davis directs half a dozen volunteers as they unload a 16-foot truck in front of a Nashville duplex. Bunk beds, dressers, lamps and a diaper-changing station come out of the truck; so do boxes with shampoo, books, toys, a kitchen's worth of supplies. Everything going into the empty two-bedroom apartment has been donated to Re-New, a project that Davis, a high-end interior designer, began eight years ago, when she decided to start using her clients' old furniture to help domestic...

You've read the series. Now watch the documentary that brings "The Children of Central City" to an emotional, hopeful close. The multi-part special report by Jonathan Bullington and Richard Webster, with photos and video by Brett Duke and Emma Scott, premiered June 13 on NOLA.com and in The Times-Picayune. Produced as a project with the USC Annenberg School, it provides an in-depth look at the impact of growing up surrounded by violence in one of New Orleans' most culturally significant and...

The separation of children from their parents at the US-Mexico border under the Trump administration’s “zero tolerance” policy is, to many people — liberals and conservatives alike — a viscerally repellent act. Reports like the recording ProPublica obtained of children crying for their parents, or accounts of children in temporary foster care crying themselves to sleep every night, inspire in a lot of people the idea that something deeply wrong is happening. They make it apparent that not...

Indian Country remembers. This is not the first administration to order the forced separation of families. The Trump administration has initiated a zero-tolerance policy on the border. Zero tolerance means that people caught crossing the border are treated as criminals. On Friday, the Department of Homeland Security said the Trump administration separated 1,995 children from the adults they were traveling with at the U.S. border between April 19 and May 31. “The act of ripping children away...

When politicians and pundits talk about creating better jobs, they typically cite two strategies. The first, emphasized by economic nationalists and populists like President Trump, is to use trade and other policies to bring high-paying manufacturing jobs back to American soil. The second, emphasized by progressives, is to use education to prepare less advantaged workers for higher-paying jobs. But even if we did both, we would not put a significant dent in the jobs problem. The reality is...

There wasn’t a single empty seat among the six rows of wooden pews in Magistrate Judge J. Scott Hacker’s courtroom on Monday afternoon. The gallery was packed, its visitors jammed shoulder to shoulder, as if the public had crowded in to witness a momentous ruling or, perhaps, a celebrity trial. But the people who occupied these seats in the back of the courtroom were no mere observers—they were the defendants themselves. All 85 of them were immigrants charged with the same crime: illegal...

U.S. immigration agents raided an Ohio gardening company on June 5, arresting 114 suspected undocumented workers. This followed other large workplace raids , including a raid on a rural Tennessee meat-processing plant in April. The raids suggest the U.S. Department of Homeland Security is returning to sweeping immigration enforcement tactics not seen since the George W. Bush administration. While the immediate shock and trauma of these raids is visible, there are also longer-term impacts on...

According to a recent series of research briefs on youth and young adult homelessness by Chapin Hall at the University of Chicago, in the U.S., 1 in 10 young adults, or 3.5 million young people ages 18-25, experience homelessness in a year. Of that 3.5 million (73%) are homeless for one month or more. For those young adults, homelessness means a variety of experiences, ranging from sleeping outdoors, or in abandoned buildings, or in emergency shelters, to sleeping in cars, or “couch...

In the days and weeks following the suicides of celebrity chef Anthony Bourdain and handbag designer Kate Spade , a chorus of social media users urged people with depression to not be “afraid” to ask for help. But for most Americans, fear isn’t the thing that stands in the way of therapy. It’s having no one to turn to. This was the case for Sue, 57, who spent over 30 years trying to get effective treatment for bipolar disorder, depression, anxiety and a personality disorder. For years,...

The decline in life expectancy and health among less-educated white Americans is often attributed to “deaths of despair”—those from conditions like substance abuse and suicide. (Suicides, the CDC reported last week, are up nearly 30 percent since 1999.) The cause is often attributed to “cumulative distress,” as Princeton’s Anne Case and Angus Deaton have speculated . [For more of this story, written by Olga Khazan, go to ...

Garry Powers stands on Alameda Street near the North Vignes Street overpass, across from a smoke shop and a Vietnamese restaurant. He’s on the edge of Chinatown and a couple of miles north of Boyle Heights, a neighborhood once rife with gangs. The wall behind him is a glowing yellow-gold. Painted on it are outspread blue wings that nearly match the faded tattoo on his neck. He looks swathed in wings. A halo on the wall seems to hover above his head. Powers grew up in Baldwin Park outside Los...

Ben Zimmerman lives in a suburb of Chicago. Like a lot of 9-year-olds, he's fond of YouTube, Roblox, and Minecraft. And, like a lot of parents, his mom and dad wanted to make sure Ben wasn't spending too much time on those activities. They tried to use Google's "Family Link" parental control software to limit screen time for Ben and his older sister, Claudia. Ben went on YouTube to search for a workaround. When he couldn't find one, he figured one out himself. His dad, who happens to work in...

U.S. immigration agents raided an Ohio gardening company on June 5, arresting 114 suspected undocumented workers. This followed other large workplace raids , including a raid on a rural Tennessee meat-processing plant in April. The raids suggest the U.S. Department of Homeland Security is returning to sweeping immigration enforcement tactics not seen since the George W. Bush administration. While the immediate shock and trauma of these raids is visible, there are also longer-term impacts on...

After celebrities Kate Spade and Anthony Bourdain died by suicide within days of each other last week , thousands of people picked up their phones. Messages to the National Crisis Text Line more than doubled. Calls to the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline jumped 65 percent. Social media was flooded with news reports and personal messages encouraging people to reach out for help. Mental health advocates hope this bit of viral attention can be harnessed for lasting changes. Dr. Steve...

In 2016, high school rising junior Hank Sanders had an inkling of an idea. He wanted to take his school’s popular culinary arts class and give the food to people experiencing homelessness. As it stood, students ate the food they cooked. Outside Portland, Oregon’s Lincoln High School, where Sanders attends, he saw people who were sleeping on the streets. He approached his friends with his idea and they ran with it. As with many cities across the U.S., Portland has a homelessness problem. In...

An immigration official announced this past Friday that, in the 42 days between April 19 and May 31, approximately 2,000 immigrant children were removed from the care of their parents and taken into federal custody, At the same time, 11,000 immigrant children are now in shelters, according to the Office of Refugee Resettlement. “Shelters,” however, appears to be a catch-all term for a wide variety of facilities that vary from small, generally child-friendly structures, to a converted Walmart...

This column was originally written for VOXatl.com . Dayonn Davis was 15 when he committed a crime that would get him tried in court as an adult. A Facebook sale of a pair of Oreo Nikes, priced at around $100, went sour when the Columbus, Georgia teen attempted to steal them. Without the knowledge of Davis, a friend pulled out a pistol and everybody ran. Reluctantly, Davis finally gave up the name of his armed friend, but the victim could not pick him out of a lineup. For that 2016 crime,...

“Are little kids really being put in jail?” That was the question my daughters asked me when I picked them up from summer camp last week. For a minute, I was stunned into silence. I took a deep breath, overwhelmed by sadness that we live in a world where kids — younger than my own girls — are indeed living this reality. My daughters had talked with friends about what they are hearing on the news. They didn’t understand why anyone would take children away from their mom or dad. They didn’t...