Mental Health – WHYY: Recent Episodes
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Vulnerable students in some of Philly’s Independence Mission Schools will soon find relief thanks to a partnership with the nonprofit organization Gabrielle’s Wings, as mental health and social learning support will become available.
Michelle Hord, founder of Gabrielle’s Wings, created the Peace Corners program, named in honor of her daughter who died tragically at the hands of her husband seven years ago. That event led Hord to create spaces for children to get emotional help at school. The program also trains school staff and teachers on how to handle the concerns and stresses of students who face trauma or socioeconomic issues at home.
“Helping to understand and manage emotions, those skills help reduce instances of behavioral issues,” Hord said. “A kid may be hungry or there was an argument at home, they come in, they’re disruptive in the classroom, maybe they get sent to the principal’s office and get sent home.”
The IMS network has 14 Catholic schools across the city of Philadelphia and serves 3,800 students in pre-K to eighth grade. According to the school system, 75% of students come from households where the total income is less than $45,000. Additionally, schools are located in neighborhoods with the highest poverty levels in Philadelphia, and some are among the poorest in the nation.
Hord said the program offers staff an alternative solution without using traditional methods of punishment. “Instead, this child can go to one of these peace corners, perhaps talk it out with the counselor there. Unwind, have some down time, feel the love and go back into the classroom, ready to learn,” Hord said.
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Teachers deal with nearly all types of challenges in the classroom. While they are pretty equipped to handle most of them, school shooter incidents have taken their toll.
Arthur Steinberg, President of the Philadelphia Federation of Teachers explained, “Our members report mixed opinions about the utility of safety drills, but many agree that they are traumatizing and underscore the absolute failure of state and federal government to appropriately regulate the firearms industry and trade.”
A new RAND survey reveals that the sentiments expressed by Steinberg regarding school safety and active shooter drills mirror those of teachers across the country.
Researchers administered a survey to a randomly selected sample of 1,020 K–12 teachers using the American Teacher Panel.
According to RAND, the survey “specifically asked whether such drills made teachers feel more or less safe and prepared to respond to active assailant events and teachers’ perceptions of their students’ feelings about such drills, as well as whether supports were available to students and staff during and following drills.”
The RAND survey pointed out some key findings:
- One in six K–12 teachers nationally works in a district that has been touched by gun violence since the 2019–2020 school year.
- Schools do not typically announce when an active shooter drill will occur to students and parents, and many schools are not providing support to help students and staff manage any stress or anxiety that such drills often cause.
- Teachers are split on whether participation in drills makes them feel more prepared to respond to active shooter incidents: Slightly less than half said that drills make them feel more prepared, and half perceived drills as having no impact on preparedness. A slight majority of teachers (54%) reported that drills make students feel more prepared to respond to such incidents.
- Most teachers (69%) indicated that participating in active shooter drills has no impact on their perceptions of safety at school, and only one-fifth said that drills make them feel more safe.
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A federal agency has awarded $1.2 million dollars to community health centers in Philadelphia to expand mental health care and substance use disorder treatment.
The money will be split into two $600,000 grants, going to nonprofit Greater Philadelphia Health Action and the city Department of Public Health’s Ambulatory Health Services division, which manages nine City Health Centers.
Both operate public health clinics that offer low-cost primary care and some behavioral health services for people who are underinsured or uninsured.
The funding is part of $7.7 million in grants, 13 in total, that will be distributed to community health organizations and programs across Pennsylvania.
Carole Johnson, administrator of the federal Health Resources and Services Administration, said the purpose of this money is to make behavioral health care more accessible where people are already getting other types of health care.
“If we’re going to be able to meet the moment when it comes to the increasing demand for mental health and substance use disorder services, then we need to use our full footprint of where we deliver health care,” Johnson said, “and integrating these services into primary care just makes a whole lot of sense.”
It’s hard to know if your health insurance plan is as good as advertised. You pay a monthly premium to access a network of health providers. But call the numbers in your provider directory, and you’re bound to find ones who can’t — or won’t — see you.
These errors are at the heart of a ghost network. Some providers have moved, retired or even died; others left insurance networks because of low pay and intense scrutiny. Even though these providers no longer accept your insurance, their names may remain in the directory. When that happens, policyholders are left to believe that the plan has more options than actually exist.
“Any inaccuracy constitutes a ghost network,” said Abigail Burman, a consumer protection attorney who studies provider directory errors. “This is basic information. It needs to be right.”
Insurers’ failures to correct these errors have led to dire consequences for people seeking mental health care, as demonstrated by a recent ProPublica investigation of one man’s months of struggle to access treatment. Because of the widespread nature of ghost networks, some policyholders are more likely to pay out-of-network costs and face a greater chance of treatment delays — if they get treatment at all.
‘I don’t want to die’: How one patient got trapped in his insurer’s ghost networkProPublica spoke with experts, clinicians and advocates to understand the challenges posed by provider directory errors. They all suggested specific ways for policyholders to navigate a ghost network.
How much do insurers know about the errors in their directories? And what are they required to do about it?Insurers have acknowledged the problem and in some cases have vowed to address it. AHIP, a national association of health insurers, said in a 2023 statement to the U.S. Senate Committee on Finance that insurers update provider directories through “regular phone calls, emails, online reminders, and in-person visits.” However, AHIP wrote that insurers can’t always quickly fix errors because providers sometimes fail to keep their own professional information up to date. (AHIP declined ProPublica’s request for an interview.)
But Dr. Robert Trestman, a Virginia psychiatrist who testified about ghost networks to the same committee, told ProPublica that insurers are able to track “every detail of finance” around things such as billing and coding. Because of that, he said, insurers’ failures “to set up a system for keeping track of who is in network or not is on them.”
But insurers haven’t had to make it a priority. Simon Haeder, a Texas A&M University professor who studies ghost networks, said that insurers have “very little incentive” to closely monitor directories. Unless tougher regulations are passed, he said, policyholders will continue to struggle with directories full of “inconsistent, outdated or incomplete data.”
For years, it has fallen to academic researchers and secret shopper surveys to reveal the pervasiveness of these errors. Lawmakers have passed bills and called for further reforms. In spite of that, the errors still plague policyholders.
I’m shopping for a plan. How do I know if it is as good as advertised?Do your homework. In the absence of the insurer making it a priority to update its directory, the task of checking its accuracy falls to you. You can head to the website of the insurer whose health plan you’re interested in buying. Find the provider portal. Since an insurer may offer different networks for each plan, experts suggest double-checking that you’re only searching for providers available in the network that you want.
If you already have a provider, type in their name to see if that person is listed in-network. If you don’t have one, find a provider that’s listed as being in network and taking new patients, and who seems to meet your needs. From there, experts encourage reaching out directly to the provider to verify that both of those things are true.
“Verify, verify, verify,” said Dr. Jane Zhu, an associate professor at Oregon Health & Science University’s medical school who studies ghost networks. “Accuracy in behavioral health provider directories is akin to a coin flip.”
I already have a health plan. What should I do?Don’t worry if you’ve paid for a plan or have one through your employer. There are other ways to minimize the perils of provider directory errors.
But experts say that you’ll need to arm yourself with some facts.
Track down your “Evidence of Coverage.” The document, which is typically about 100 pages long, outlines what your insurer must do to fulfill its contractual obligations. For instance, if you can’t access an in-network mental health provider within a certain period of time, the insurer may be on the hook for tracking down an out-of-network provider.
From there, you can call the insurer to find out if it handles your mental health benefits or if it has outsourced management of them. If those benefits are “carved out” from your plan, you may have to seek answers about provider directory errors from that subcontractor. (Should you encounter any errors in your directory, this information could come in handy.)
Experts say that by getting these answers, you’ll be able to better fight for your rights.
What should I do if I encounter provider directory errors?Health care experts warn that you’re likely to encounter errors in your provider directory. They advise not to become discouraged when you do.
David Lloyd, chief policy officer with the mental health advocacy group Inseparable, suggests taking notes of the calls to providers. Did they answer the phone? Did they say they accept your plan? Do they see new patients? You can write all your notes down in this handy worksheet created by Cover My Mental Health, an Illinois-based consumer advocacy group. Take photos of the directory errors, too.
Is Gen Z’s “modest” lifestyle a good thing? Young people on Philly college campuses are reporting stress, while also engaging in fewer traditional vices. Join us as we explore this paradox with Jennifer Pollitt, director of Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies at Temple University, and Lilianna Phan, tobacco-related health disparities behavioral scientist from Drexel University.
This story is from The Pulse, a weekly health and science podcast.
Find it on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.
In 1991, Patrick Kennedy, the youngest son of then U.S. Senator Ted Kennedy, was serving in the Rhode Island state legislature when a bombshell article came out in the National Enquirer. Kennedy’s former roommate from an addiction treatment facility had sold his story to the tabloid.
The salacious article claimed that Kennedy had a raging cocaine habit when he was attending an exclusive prep school which is why he had to go to rehab. In a letter to voters, Kennedy admitted that he had gotten treatment as a teenager, but declared that “problems of my adolescence have no bearing on my public service.” He was re-elected, and in 1995, he went on to serve in Congress, where he supported the Mental Health Parity Act even though stigma around mental illness and addiction was much greater back then. Putting your name on mental health legislation could raise eyebrows — but Kennedy felt that his personal connection to these issues was already known.
“I didn’t have to worry as much about being found out, because all of that was already public,” he said.
But “all of that” was not public. There was so much more that the public didn’t know yet. Kennedy was still struggling with addiction issues, and had been in treatment for depression since he was a teenager. He crashed his car into a barricade on Capitol Hill while driving intoxicated in 2006. In 2009, he went into rehab again, and decided not to run for re-election in 2010.
From there he devoted his life to mental health advocacy which has also meant being radically honest about his own struggles. He says it’s something he learned to do in phases, little by little.
“I just focus on my recovery and part of my focus on recovery is acceptance, acceptance that I need help, acceptance that I have to change everything, acceptance that I have to do things that are not comfortable for me to do because frankly, part of treatment is doing the uncomfortable things,” Kennedy said.
In 2012, author and journalist Stephen Fried first wrote an in-depth profile about Kennedy for Philadelphia Magazine and then a few years later they wrote a book together called “A Common Struggle.”
“Patrick talked a lot about his late father, about his mother’s struggle with alcoholism and her family in a way that it’s not like it was a big secret, but I think that Patrick talked about it in a much more open and human way,” said Fried.
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Chester County is combating a mental health pandemic, a housing crisis, food insecurity and the skyrocketing cost of living with its new human needs network.
In many counties across the Commonwealth, calls to 211 or 988 link people in need with professionals — who in some cases, are too far away to act.
Pennsylvania’s wealthiest county is positioning qualified counselors on the line and specialists on the streets to reach people where they are. Chester County developed its Human Needs Network with input from more than 50 local organizations. Unused American Rescue Plan Act funds covered most of the county’s investment.
“Instead of calling Pittsburgh to be triaged for an issue, you’ll be calling a neighbor potentially who knows the nonprofits they’re going to try and connect you to,” said Josh Maxwell, chair of the county Board of Commissioners. “So, it’s making services more local and more attainable to people.”
For months, the county Department of Human Services softly rolled out its own contact center to handle 211 and 988 calls. The county also assembled a handful of mobile crisis resolution teams. To date, the call center has dispatched the unit more than 350 times across the county.
Officials recently shared their early successes with Pennsylvania Department of Human Services Secretary Dr. Valerie A. Arkoosh, who toured the new center.
“The county is taking all the resources at their disposal — some fantastic staff and real leadership from their county commissioners — and putting together this system of crisis response that is obviously very effective and is only going to continue to improve to serve the residents of Chester County,” Arkoosh said.
This story is from The Pulse, a weekly health and science podcast.
Find it on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.
In 2015, Matt Kerr was fresh out of college and full of ideas — so many ideas that he made an 8-page plan. His main mission: to bring music instruction to incarcerated teenagers, as a way to foster expression and navigate emotions.
“It’s such a natural means of expressing what’s hard to say,” said Kerr. “It’s one of the things that we can both do as self-expression and also communal expression.”
Kerr added that music allows people to express their own emotions, but also to share those feelings in a group setting.
That idea helped birth a Philadelphia program called Beyond The Bars. It has since expanded to community centers and schools throughout the city.
“Music activates a lot of parts of the brain that aren’t activated just through talking,” said Brian Decker, a certified music therapist in Philadelphia. “It really activates all these different motor neurons … It’s very engaging in a way that talk therapy might not be for certain people.”
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The Delaware County Department of Human Services wants to jumpstart a county-wide program to divert people with mental health issues away from the legal system and into treatment.
The program would give police officers the discretion to refer people with behavioral conditions to a case manager in lieu of arrest.
At Wednesday night’s regularly scheduled meeting, Delaware County Council permitted DHS to request proposals for a provider who can get started as early as December 2024.
“The goal of the program is to connect individuals to treatment and to keep them out of the criminal justice system as much as possible — and to make sure that we have the support and process in place to do that,” Councilmember Dr. Monica Taylor told WHYY News.
Upper Darby and Haverford police departments are already piloting a program that dispatches mental health professionals alongside officers during behavioral health emergencies.
The county-led mobile crisis unit has been going on for about a year.
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Do you have any ideas to help spread awareness for the new, three-digit national mental health and suicide crisis support number, 988? If so, now is the time to get creative.
The Jeme Agency in Philadelphia is making it easier for organizations, advocates and experts to spread the word about the crisis lifeline. The agency, which creates designs, branding and communication for companies and social impact campaigns, recently launched an online do-it-yourself design program for anyone to use to make 988 more visible in schools, homes, public spaces and on social media.
“It is a tool that anyone who has access to it, if they wanted to make their own T-shirts, create a flyer, a poster, they absolutely could,” said Meegan Denenberg, Jeme Agency founder.
The short and simple three-digit crisis number, 988, launched two years ago, replacing the original national lifeline.
National behavioral health experts and local public health workers in Philadelphia who oversee the region’s lifeline crisis response centers hoped that a shorter number would make it easier for people to remember during an emergency.
Data show that calls and texts to the 24/7 crisis line have increased nationally and in many states since the rebranding, but experts say too many people still don’t know that 988 is an option.
This is why the Jeme Agency is stepping in with this DIY awareness campaign.
“The one thing that I remembered about 911 when I was a kid was that almost every refrigerator had a magnet that said ‘911.’ Every babysitter was given a note that said, ‘Call 911,’” Denenberg said.
“I was like, how can we create something [for 988] that instead of just saying, ‘You should trust us,’ We integrate it into where you work, you play, you pray, where life happens so that it starts becoming something that is very standardized,” she said.
An unexpected highlight of the Democratic National Convention on Night Three was an outburst of pride from the son of vice presidential candidate Tim Walz.
“That’s my dad!” 17-year-old Gus Walz could be seen exclaiming Wednesday night. He stood, tears streaming down his face, and pointed to his father, the governor of Minnesota, who accepted the party nomination for vice president.
Gus wept through much of the 16-minute speech, and took the stage with his family afterward, wrapping his dad in a tight bear hug, burying his face in his shoulder.
The high school senior’s joy quickly went viral. He was still trending Thursday on X, the social media platform formerly known as Twitter. And his newfound fame is focusing attention on the challenges of people with learning disabilities. His parents recently revealed to People magazine that Gus has ADHD, an anxiety disorder and something called a non-verbal learning disorder. Searches on Google have spiked since Thursday night this week for the disorder and for the teen’s name.
There’s no standard definition for non-verbal learning disorder. It doesn’t mean people with it can’t talk. But according to the NVLD Project at Columbia University, people with it “struggle with a range of conditions that include social and spatial disabilities. Often they are marginalized and isolated; consequently, they can experience social barriers throughout their lives.”
There has long been tension between Washington and local school districts over federal funding of special education. Federal law requires schools to provide special education services, but doesn’t come close to covering the costs. When passed in 1975, the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) committed the federal government to paying 40% of the average per-pupil expenditure for special education. But currently it’s more like 13%.
That’s one reason the Democratic Party platform adopted at the convention this week says, “We support fully funding IDEA to prioritize students with disabilities and the special educator workforce.” This year’s Republican Party platform doesn’t mention special education. But dozens of national education groups have long called for fully funding the costs that IDEA imposes on local schools.
The actual prospects for more money under a Harris-Walz administration are unclear. Much would depend on the future federal budget picture and the composition of the next Congress. And platforms aren’t binding on candidates.
But Walz as governor has approved large increases in education funding, including special education. The two-year budget he signed in 2024 included a 6% increase in per-pupil funding for local schools, and it indexes future funding to inflation. It also included a large boost in state support for special education to help fill the gap in federal funding.
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Kids and teens will soon return to classrooms for another school year, and it can be a big adjustment for families as they transition from a relaxed summer environment into structured schedules again.
While there might be excitement and anticipation, Philadelphia psychologists say it’s also normal for students to feel anxious and worried about these changes, and there are things families can do to support their kids’ mental health and help them through the transition phase.
“Normalize it for them,” said Anna Cruz, a psychologist at St. Christopher’s Hospital for Children. “Parents saying like, ‘This is a new school year, how are you feeling?’ And seeing where their worries are and then coming together about how we can address it.”
Young children and teens are likely dealing with earlier sleep schedules, navigating new social groups, meeting new teachers and facing different academic challenges. All of that can create new stressors or exacerbate existing ones, especially for kids managing a mental health condition.
Nearly one in 10 school-aged kids have a diagnosed anxiety disorder, and over 4% are diagnosed with depression, according to federal data.
“Anxiety in novel situations or situations where there’s a fair amount of uncertainty is completely reasonable,” said Yesenia Marroquin, a clinical psychologist at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia. “It’s when we start seeing that this is leading to avoidance behavior, that’s where we want to take a step back and sort through, ‘How much is this [healthy] versus detrimental?’”
Typical worries can include kids asking about what their day might look like, their new teachers, having enough school clothes and supplies, and making new friends.
Cruz said parents and caregivers should be on the lookout for any signs showing that these concerns are developing into something bigger, or that new issues are coming up during the school year.
Higher levels of anxiety and stress might manifest in kids and teens as complaints of headaches, stomach pains or other physical ailments, especially in the morning before going to school or during the day as they request to leave school early.
“And if they are starting to refuse to go to school, now not only are they nervous but it’s impacting their functioning,” Cruz said. “We recognize that anxiety now has hit a point that it is concerning, it’s no longer at that stage where it’s helping us be productive and active.”
This story is from The Pulse, a weekly health and science podcast.
Find it on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Last spring, psychologist and therapist Jessica Jackson got word about a mysterious website that had become notorious among her colleagues.
“There was a company, an anonymous company. So, they weren’t sharing who they were, but they were paying people to upload their therapy sessions,” Jackson said.
They were paying $50 via Venmo or Paypal for people in therapy who were willing to share 45-minutes of clear audio from their sessions.
No one seemed to know who was making this offer — all of the website domain ownership details were kept private. But Jackson and her colleagues had a hunch as to why that audio was worth money.
“We assumed that they were training a large language model on these things,” said Jackson, who chairs the American Psychological Association’s Mental Health Technology Committee.
She suspected that whoever was buying the therapy session audio was using it to train a chatbot, a robot therapist.
In principle, Jackson wasn’t offended by the idea behind the website. Recording therapy sessions have long been a part of training for human therapists.
“When I was in grad school, we would record sessions,” said Jackson. “Our supervisor would listen to it and give feedback.”
But the recordings she trained with were made after clients consented to very specific conditions. Their personal information was anonymized, the audio was only available to other therapists in training. This website seemed more like a free-for-all, missing disclosures about how the client’s information would be used. And the therapist’s, too.
“It became a big thing in the therapist community, because that means that clients were now taping their sessions and not letting their therapist know. And then they were getting paid to upload this session and the therapist did not know that was happening.”
This story is from The Pulse, a weekly health and science podcast.
Find it on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Comedian Kelli Dunham has spent her life helping people — as a nun, a nurse, and a caretaker for loved ones. But even though Dunham’s had some hard times in her life, she struggles to accept help from others. This contradiction is at the center of her new standup show, Second Helping. In performances like the one she did recently at First Person Arts, Dunham has made it her mission to get people comfortable with accepting help.
But producer Justin Kramon wonders: Is Dunham really getting better at asking for help herself? To find out, he’s set up a challenge for her. The two head to Times Square in New York City and Dunham can’t leave until she asks a few strangers for help.
Will she do it? The result is awkward, funny, and revealing about what it means to let a little help into your life.
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Montgomery County officials intend to debut a 24/7 emergency behavioral crisis center by the end of 2025.
“The launch of this crisis center marks a significant step forward for Montgomery County’s commitment to serving our most vulnerable residents in their most vulnerable moments,” said Jamila Winder, chair of the Montgomery County Board of Commissioners.
The walk-in facility will offer rapid intervention services and support for people experiencing mental health crises. With about a half dozen in-patient beds for children, the center is expected to have the capacity to accommodate overnight stays.
The Montgomery County Board of Commissioners gathered Monday on the steps of the county courthouse in Norristown to announce its investment into the center — which has yet to find a home. Nevertheless, officials hope it will set the bar as a national standard.
“Anyone will be able to use this center, from a young teen experiencing suicidal thoughts to a senior veteran who is struggling with substance abuse,” Winder, a first-term Democrat, said. “Any patient in crisis, not sure where to turn, no matter their age or their status — will be able to come to the center and seek treatment.”
Pennsylvania’s Senate on Wednesday approved a bill to encourage school districts to start a pilot program that effectively bans students’ use of cellphones during the school day in an effort to improve their mental health and academic performance.
The bill, which passed 45-5, would authorize grants to school districts to buy locking bags after the district creates a policy requiring students to leave their phones in such bags for the whole school day. It now goes to the state House for consideration.
The bill’s sponsor, Republican state Sen. Ryan Aument of Lancaster, said he hopes that limits on phone use will result in improvements in students’ mental health and academic performance.
“Kids spend so much time on social media and using their smartphones that it’s taking a toll on them mentally, emotionally and academically. Smartphone restrictions have proved successful in reversing these trends,” Aument said.
When Pixar’s Inside Out opened in movie theaters almost a decade ago, viewers were introduced to 11-year-old Riley and the emotions that defined her young life…joy, sadness, anger, fear and disgust, each drawn as a different character.
In Inside Out 2, Riley is 13 and she’s dealing with the raging emotions that come with PUBERTY!….embarrassment, envy, ennui and most notably anxiety…a big-mouthed, bug-eyed, character with wild, carrot top hair.
This week on The Connection…understanding the important role that all emotions, including anxiety, play throughout our lives. Our guests were consultants on the film. Psychologist Dacher Keltner is co-director of the Greater Good Science Center at University of California, Berkeley. His most recent book is titled Awe. Psychologist Lisa Damour specializes in treating adolescents. Her most recent book is The Emotional Lives of Teenagers
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This story was supported by a statehouse coverage grant from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.
Legislation legalizing medical aid in dying in Delaware is headed to the governor’s desk after narrowly passing in the Senate.
Sometimes known as “physician-” or “medically assisted suicide,” the legislation would allow terminally ill people with less than six months to live to request and ingest medication to end their lives. Two doctors would be required to certify that the patient is mentally capable, making an informed decision and is acting voluntarily.
The bill passed the Delaware Senate on an 11-10 vote Tuesday after failing 9-9 last week. Senate sponsor Sen. Bryan Townsend changed his vote from “yes” to “no” so he could bring the bill up again Tuesday.
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In Philadelphia, over 66,000 children are considered potentially at risk of having mental and behavioral disorders but there are only 60 qualified psychiatrists to provide treatment, according to a new report from the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatrists.
That’s a ratio of 1,100 at-risk youths to one child and adolescent psychiatrist.
“The pandemic really amplified the mental health crisis, especially in youth,” said Dr. Consuelo Cagande, the Division Chief for Community Care and Wellness at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia. “Now it really is moving at a quicker pace than we can catch up in having child psychiatrists trained on time to meet the needs and the demands.”
This story originally appeared on Spotlight PA.
Tristan Rovito finally moved out of his mother’s house this month. The 25-year-old had wanted to leave since at least 2019, and his mother, Becky Bowling of Carlisle, had been trying to make that happen for a while.
But for Rovito, flying the nest was not as simple as finding an apartment and a couple of roommates. He has autism and low vision, which limit his social and communication skills, and his ability to care for himself.
Before the move, Bowling had been his caregiver around the clock, but the work was difficult and required her to quit her job. The situation was not sustainable, she told How We Care, which is why she needed her son to live on his own in a group home.
“I feel like my mom needs to have a lot of breaks from me,” said Rovito, who admits he was also itching for a change.
Both of them are thrilled that Rovito now lives in a group home, the entire cost of which is covered by a waiver from Pennsylvania’s Medicaid Home and Community-Based Services program.
A group home is a supervised residence for adults with autism and intellectual disabilities. It’s staffed by direct support professionals who assist Rovito and his two roommates with tasks like light housework, personal hygiene, and meal preparation.
“It’s going good,” said Rovito, who reports that his new roommates are nice and that he looks forward to spending more time with his girlfriend.
It took a long wait for him to get these services, a common experience in Pennsylvania.
Because the level of need exceeds what’s appropriated in the state budget, adults with autism and intellectual disabilities in the commonwealth spend months, if not years, waiting for waivers that pay for services, to which they’re entitled as Medicaid beneficiaries. April data from the Pennsylvania Department of Human Services show nearly 13,000 adults are on waitlists to receive these services. A 2022 report from DHS found that the median amount of time that people spend on all waiver waitlists is 2.6 years.
Once Rovito got the approval to be added to a waiver waitlist, it took nine months for a group home spot to open up. He describes these months of limbo as a “nightmare.”
“That period of time was really hard on both of us,” seconded Bowling. During the nine-month wait, she said they wondered “‘You know, is it going to happen?’”
Democratic Gov. Josh Shapiro’s budget proposal includes $78 million that would allow the Office of Developmental Programs to increase the number of waiver slots by 1,500 so that people like Rovito don’t need to wait so long for spots at group homes, as well as other services. The waiver program gives families access to a range of services, including various therapies, shift nursing, job counseling, respite for caregivers, and assistance with daily living tasks such as personal hygiene, transportation, and budgeting.
Legislative leaders, including Democrats who control the state House and Republicans who run the state Senate, are currently negotiating what the final budget deal will look like ahead of the June 30 deadline.
“The governor put a lot on the table with his budget proposal. While accommodating all his requests is not feasible, this is an area I certainly feel a need to address to the best of our ability,” said state Senate Majority Leader Joe Pittman (R., Indiana) in an emailed statement.
Ashley Klein realized she had a pattern of relationship issues stemming from the sexual abuse she endured as a child. In 2022, she sought help.
Of the several places she called, the Network of Victim Assistance in Bucks County, or NOVA, got back to her right away and told her she could access their services at no cost — and without going through a criminal justice process.
“When they said victims of crime … I’m like, ‘Okay, do I have to prove that I went through any criminal verification, any sort of thing like that?’” Klein said. “They basically just went off of my word. And so that was relieving.”
NOVA has served victims of crime who live in Bucks County, or victims of crimes committed in Bucks County, for half a century. Founded as Women Organized Against Rape (WOAR) in 1974, the organization was originally focused on victims of sexual assault and strove to educate the judicial system about sexual violence. By the early ‘80s, NOVA expanded its reach to provide services for all victims of serious crime in the county under its current name.
Penelope Ettinger, executive director of NOVA, said the organization has stayed true to its mission to serve victims of crime — and to be a support for victims of sexual assault in the legal system, if they decide to press charges. Ettinger stressed that a victim of a crime does not have to have filed a police report or pursue a criminal charge in order to access their services.
To date, NOVA has served over 100,000 victims of serious crimes or their family members. The organization has also educated more than 800,000 children and adults through their prevention programs, focused on empowering people to protect themselves and loved ones from crimes. Currently, NOVA runs prevention programs in all of the county’s school districts, as well as some private schools, which they tailor to fit the school’s needs and requests.
“I would say to the public, that if you have been the victim of a crime, or you’ve been hurt in any way by another person, you can call our hotline,” Ettinger said, stressing that, as in Klein’s case, victims of crimes that occurred years or even decades ago are eligible to get help at NOVA.
An important piece of NOVA’s support of sexual assault victims is their forensic nursing program. Nurses in the program can conduct exams and record evidence for victims of sexual assault or non-fatal strangulation who call their helpline. The nurses also go to the five hospitals in the county that are partnered with the organization and offer their services at A Woman’s Place, a Bucks County nonprofit serving victims of domestic violence.
“I think the collaboration that we have with the District Attorney’s Office and local law enforcement, and the respect the organization has, is absolutely seen by the judicial system in our county as well,” Ettinger said.
Ettinger stressed that the decision to pursue charges in the case of a sexual assault or non-fatal strangulation lies with the victim.
“We are there to support you as a victim,” she said. “We’re there to give you the information and to empower you, and you’re making the decision. You can have a sexual assault exam done, and it’s anonymous until that point in time that you may want … to go ahead with an investigation.”
For Klein, the 10 months of treatment she received at NOVA “changed [her] life.”
“I’m 36 years old. And for the first time, after receiving services with NOVA, I was finally able to open up to my parents, who I’ve been very close with my entire life, and tell them what happened to me as a kid,” Klein said. “And that was one of the biggest things that I could never do … That is a long time to hold on to something from people that you love.”
“The services that I was provided with NOVA gave me, honestly, if I could just wrap it up in one word, freedom. Definitely freedom. I feel like I can live now,” Klein said.
Are you good at giving advice? We’re talking to R. Eric Thomas who will have to answer people’s questions in his new national advice column.
Pennsylvania Senator John Fetterman has been causing consternation among some Democrats for his outspoken support of Israel and harder line on immigration. The freshman senator known for his down-to-earth style, has progressives wondering if his politics have shifted right. We’ll talk with New York Times congressional correspondent Annie Karnie about how Fetterman is rankling progressives and winning over conservatives.
Everyone is looking for the fountain of youth. Friendship might just be the answer. Having a tight and strong social network can boost longevity. But why are social connections so important as we age? We’ll look at how friendships improve health and well-being when we get older. Joining us are Dr. Michael Danielewicz, doctor of geriatric medicine at Jefferson Health, and Mary Groce, resident of the John C. Anderson Apartments in Philadelphia.
Teens share their thoughts about bridging generational divides and what we can learn from one another. We hear from WHYY’s Spoken Youth Podcast.
This story is from The Pulse, a weekly health and science podcast.
Find it on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Being identified as “gifted” in school has long been associated with certain traits — high IQ, good grades, and future achievement. This understanding has been prominent ever since psychologist Lewis Terman — known as the “father of gifted education” — began publishing the results of his seminal study, “Genetic Studies of Genius.” Throughout the decades-long research project, which he launched in 1921, Terman followed roughly 1,500 high-IQ subjects from childhood through to old age, looking at their academic performance, interests, personalities, and relationships to show that gifted children were born leaders whose intelligence deserved to be recognized and cultivated through special education.
That idea gained increasing steam with the launch of Sputnik in 1957, which spurred the U.S. government to invest federal funds into gifted education in an effort to keep up with the Soviets. To this day, many U.S. school districts have special programs for gifted children.
But new research is changing the way we understand what it means to be gifted.
“One thing we know about giftedness is that it is quite literally a different brain — it’s a piece of neurodivergence,” said psychologist Matt Zakreski, a former gifted kid himself who now works with and consults on the topic of gifted children.
Zakreski says the field of giftedness has been changing over the past decade or so, thanks in part to fMRI studies showing that the brains of gifted children are physically different. This research could explain the challenges some gifted children experience, both with social and emotional issues, and with so-called “gifted burnout” — which, in some cases, leads to kids crashing and burning after a promising start.
The result — deep feelings of inadequacy and failure among teens and young adults who feel like they’ve wasted their potential, and failed at the one thing they were destined to do.
How brain differences manifestTake a typical 10-year-old child — they’re 10 physically, intellectually, emotionally, and socially. But gifted kids’ brains develop differently — or asynchronously, according to Zakreski.
“There’s so much developmental energy that goes to the top part of the brain, the cerebral cortex, that other things lag, because there’s only so much energy to go around,” he said. “So that same 10-year-old, if they’re gifted, will be intellectually 15, academically 14, socially nine, emotionally eight.”
For example, studies have found that gifted kids have greater volume and connectivity in their cerebral cortex, which allows them to absorb and process information faster. And they have this “info sponge” phase for longer than other kids.
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Odalis Delgado said that for many immigrants like herself who speak Spanish and other languages, getting help with health care and other services can be difficult after moving to the United States.
Delgado said she had never heard of a potential resource: certified peer specialists who work in the behavioral health field and use their experiences to help others get these services and guidance.
Then, Mental Health Partnerships in Philadelphia began offering peer specialist certification courses entirely in Spanish this spring, and it caught Delgado’s attention. She enrolled to become trained and certified.
“When I saw it was in Spanish, I said, OK, I can do it,” she said.
Odalis Delgado stands in the classroom at Mental Health Partnerships in Center City where she trained to be a certified peer support specialist. (Emma Lee/WHYY)Pennsylvania behavioral health organizations like Mental Health Partnerships are looking to train more Spanish and bilingual speakers to become peer-to-peer mental health professionals after the state loosened its certification requirements for these workers earlier this year.
People no longer need proof of a high school diploma to become a certified peer specialist, which experts say was a barrier for people who grew up and attended school in other countries.
At the same time, research shows that demand for mental and behavioral health services is at an all-time high while the field faces a provider shortage.
Reggie Connell, chief operating officer at Mental Health Partnerships, said he hopes the changes in state requirements and these new training opportunities will attract more peer specialists who can better reach underserved communities and non-English speakers.
“We want to hear the person’s real words, we want to understand their real story, hear their real narrative of how they’re feeling,” Connell said. “And then we want to serve them and make sure they’re sustaining their recovery.”
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Odalis Delgado dijo que para muchos inmigrantes como ella, que hablan español y otros idiomas, puede resultar difícil obtener ayuda con atención médica y otros servicios después de mudarse a los Estados Unidos.
Delgado comentó que nunca había escuchado de este recurso potencial: especialistas certificados que trabajan en el campo de salud de comportamiento y que utilizan su propia experiencia previa para ayudar a otros a conseguir este tipo de servicios y orientación.
Luego, Mental Health Partnerships en Filadelfia comenzó a ofrecer cursos de certificación de especialista completamente en español esta primavera, y atrajo la atención de Delgado. Se inscribió para capacitarse y certificarse.
“Cuando vi que estaba en español dije, OK, eso lo puedo hacer”, dijo Delgado.
Odalis Delgado se para en la sala de clase de Mental Health Partnerships en Center City, donde se capacitó para ser una especialista certificada. (Emma Lee/WHYY)Las organizaciones de salud de comportamiento de Pensilvania, como Mental Health Partnerships, buscan capacitar a más hispanohablantes y bilingües para que se convierten en profesionales de salud mental después de que el estado aflojó sus requisitos de certificación para estos trabajadores a principios de este año.
Las personas ya no necesitan presentar prueba de un diploma de escuela secundaria para convertirse en especialista certificado, lo que, según los expertos, fue una barrera para las personas que crecieron y fueron a la escuela en otros países.
Al mismo tiempo, investigaciones muestran que la demanda de servicios de salud mental y de comportamiento está en su punto más alto mientras el campo enfrenta una falta de proveedores.
Reggie Connell, director de operaciones en Mental Health Partnerships, dijo que espera que los cambios en los requisitos estatales y estas nuevas oportunidades de capacitación atraigan a más especialistas que puedan llegar mejor a las comunidades desatendidas y a las que no hablan inglés.
“Queremos escuchar las palabras reales de la persona, queremos entender su historia real, escuchar su narrativa real de cómo se siente”, dijo Connell. “Y luego queremos servirles y asegurarnos de que mantengan su recuperación”.
La organización sin fines de lucro de Filadelfia comenzó a ofrecer capacitación para hispanohablantes esta primavera en asociación con el Departamento de Servicios de Salud de Comportamiento y Discapacidad Intelectual de la ciudad. El curso de dos semanas es gratuito.
This story is from The Pulse, a weekly health and science podcast.
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Pediatrician Joe Sherman was working at an outpatient pediatric clinic — decades into his career — when he realized that juggling the demands of teaching, completing administrative work, and taking care of patients was becoming totally overwhelming.
“The more that I tried to make up for deficiencies within the system I was working, I became more and more anxious. The more disconnected I became, the more dissociated I became a bit. And that becomes very distracting,” Sherman said.
He couldn’t keep up. Even his commute was impaired.
“I can tell you at the peak of my anxiety that I was experiencing, I had fender benders. I would be driving down the street, and in my mind, would be in three different places worrying about things, and all of a sudden, [crash]. Nothing dangerous, but I just wasn’t paying attention.”
Beyond some minor car accidents, Sherman was worried about the impact of his anxiety on his performance as a physician. Without adequate support staff, he was unable to concentrate and feared his performance could slip.
“Whether you’ve made a mistake or you’ve been accused of having a medical error that in and of itself causes tremendous anxiety again because we are brought up in a culture where mistakes are unacceptable.”
Psychiatrist Mona Massood says this is a message that is internalized by a lot of physicians.
“We’ve kind of drank the Kool-Aid ourselves that we cannot make mistakes and we cannot be human. That it makes you a bad physician, but worse, it makes you a bad person. That’s what really is behind all of this stigma,” Massood said.
Finding supportKeeping quiet about these struggles can seem like the only option in a profession where new hires have historically been required to disclose if they have sought treatment for mental health issues and doing so could create a stain on your resume.
But then the pandemic started. Hospitals swelled over capacity. Physicians worked tirelessly.
Between shifts and behind usernames, doctors took to private social media groups to discuss COVID-19 more informally — which treatments seemed to be working and which were not.
Massood had joined some of those forums, and given her training, she picked up on a dark undercurrent beneath all the clinical talk.
Este reportaje se ha publicado en conjunto con palabra. El proyecto ha contado con fondos de la organización sin fines de lucro Economic Hardship Reporting Project y The Commonwealth Fund.
Click here to read this story in English.
La primera vez que Diego López recibió un disparo corrían los años noventa. La chaqueta de cuero que llevaba amortiguó el impacto de la bala y lo protegió de una posible perforación. Aunque acudió al hospital, renunció a la asistencia médica por temor a que la policía pudiera interrogarlo. En aquella época estaba tan delgado que pudo escapar por una ventana de la unidad de urgencias.
Aunque era tan solo un adolescente, López pertenecía a los Latin Kings, una pandilla callejera que protagonizó algunos de los enfrentamientos entre pandillas más sangrientos de Hartford, Connecticut.
Una vez que escapó del hospital, el joven trató de evadir a la policía, pero los agentes se presentaron en su casa semanas después. Aquel día, no fue detenido ni se presentaron cargos en su contra pero, con el tiempo, acabó cumpliendo 16 años de cárcel por venta de drogas y robo de vehículos.
Ahora, con 50 años, tiene nueve cicatrices de bala y un dedo menos tras haber sobrevivido a cuatro tiroteos: dos de adolescente y dos de adulto.
López muestra sus cicatrices, huellas de heridas de balas sufridas durante enfrentamientos violentos. (Aníbal Martel para palabra)“Tengo operaciones por todo el cuerpo por las heridas de bala”, dice López.
En la actualidad, sigue tratando de procesar cómo una vida de dificultades y carencias ― el crecer en un hogar fracturado por la ausencia de la figura paterna, la exposición a repetidos episodios de violencia doméstica y traumas intergeneracionales― le llevaron por ese camino.
Los latinos son afectados especialmente por la violencia armada, en especial los hombres jóvenes. Entre 2014 y 2020, el número de hispanos asesinados por armas de fuego aumentó un 66%, mientras que, a nivel nacional, las muertes por armas de fuego aumentaron un 34%, de acuerdo a Giffords, una organización que trabaja para poner fin a la violencia armada en Estados Unidos.
Otras organizaciones afirman lo mismo que Giffords. La tasa de homicidios sufridos por hispanos en Estados Unidos fue más alta que la tasa que corresponde a los blancos en 2021, según el Violence Policy Center (Centro de Políticas sobre la Violencia). Casi 75.000 hispanos fueron asesinados por armas de fuego entre 2001 y 2021, una realidad causada principalmente por la violencia interpersonal, no por tiroteos masivos. De esos 75.000, 47.119 fueron víctimas de homicidios con armas de fuego y 23.686 fueron suicidios con armas de fuego, mientras que 1.184 murieron de manera no deliberada en tiroteos. Entre 2020 y 2021, los latinos experimentaron un aumento del 14% en suicidios con armas de fuego, en comparación con un aumento del 7% entre los individuos blancos.
Sin embargo, poco se sabe del impacto concreto que la violencia asociada a las armas de fuego tiene en la salud y en la vida económica de los latinoss a nivel individual y comunitario. A pesar de la falta de datos oficiales para evaluar dicho alcance, las organizaciones locales y sin fines de lucro poseen conocimientos sobre el territorio que resultan esenciales para comprender en mayor detalle la magnitud del problema.
Desde hace tiempo, López ya no tiene más problemas legales y trabaja con su comunidad a través de COMPASS Youth Collaborative (Colaboración Juvenil COMPASS), una organización sin ánimo de lucro situada en Hartford –– la misma que salió a su rescate hace 13 años ––. Esta oportunidad de trabajar con jóvenes en situaciones similares a la que López había vivido le sirvió para reparar el daño que había causado a su comunidad.
López actualmente se desempeña como trabajador social en COMPASS Youth Collaborative (Colaboración Juvenil COMPASS) que ayuda a otras personas de la comunidad de Hartford, Connecticut. (Aníbal Martel para palabra)La organización ofrece asistencia a unos 230 de los cerca de 800 niños y jóvenes de la ciudad que han estado encarcelados o se han enfrentando al sistema judicial –– en su mayoría, procedentes de barrios con mayoría de personas de color –– y que se encuentran a la deriva como resultado de su exposición a la violencia armada. De los jóvenes que forman parte del programa, el 69% aseguró haber perdido a un familiar o amigo por este tipo de violencia.
En las ciudades, los homicidios con armas de fuego afectan mayoritariamente a jóvenes negros y latinos de barrios históricamente desfavorecidos, según Everytown for Gun Safety, la mayor organización de prevención de la violencia armada de Estados Unidos.
Día y noche, López sale a las calles de los barrios más peligrosos de Hartford en busca de jóvenes que estén viviendo la violencia de cerca. Algunos van armados y otros sufren violencia doméstica. Para muchos, una mala decisión o un estilo de vida peligroso puede llevarles a la cárcel o costarles la vida.
Como constructor de paz (peacebuilder en inglés) para COMPASS, el objetivo de López es instaurar relaciones que mejoren las vidas de estos jóvenes, además de reclutarlos para el programa de cuatro años dirigido por la organización. La iniciativa ofrece acceso a asistencia médica, a servicios especializados en salud mental, así como un camino hacia la educación y un futuro empleo.
Los tatuajes de López son un homenaje a su cultura y conmemoran a seres queridos fallecidos. (Aníbal Martel para palabra)“Los jóvenes están realmente en modo de supervivencia, y nuestro deseo es trabajar con ellos para rebajar la tensión y mostrarles un camino diferente”, afirma Jacqueline Santiago Nazario, directora general de la organización. “Creo que la violencia es un problema de salud pública, al igual que la pobreza”.
La mitad de la plantilla de COMPASS es latina. Así, se garantiza una comunicación fluida con los jóvenes, ya que algunos son inmigrantes latinoamericanos. Los constructores de paz se presentan en los hospitales locales para acompañar a pie de cama a los jóvenes afectados por la violencia armada, atender sus necesidades y evitar actos de venganza o represalias que agraven el ciclo de la violencia –– una ayuda y orientación que López nunca recibió de adolescente ––.
Inicialmente, los sobrevivientes y jóvenes tienden a mantener las distancias y son reacios a hablar, ya sea con López como con otros miembros del personal y voluntarios de COMPASS. Ganarse la confianza de estos jóvenes suele llevar unos tres meses. Sin embargo, a veces, algo tan urgente como curar una herida o prevenir infecciones no puede esperar. En estas situaciones, los constructores de paz tienen que ser persuasivos e incansables.
“Uno tiende a pensar que no necesita tratamiento médico”, advierte López a los jóvenes. Dice que, de los sobrevivientes que sí solicitan atención médica, un gran número se salta las citas de seguimiento “por ignorancia”.
“Hemos tenido casos de individuos a quienes se les caían las balas de las piernas, ya sabes, en la ducha… y no tienen ni idea de qué hacer”, añade Santiago Nazario.
López apoya a jóvenes de la comunidad de Hartford como mentor de construcción de paz del COMPASS Youth Collaborative. (Foto cortesía COMPASS Youth)Es aquí donde las experiencias vividas por López aportan enseñanzas cruciales para sus alumnos. Y es que él conoce de primera mano la importancia de tener un seguro médico y de acceder a los cuidados adecuados –– una realidad que fue más evidente la cuarta vez que le dispararon ––. Además de tener que someterse a una intervención quirúrgica intestinal, le amputaron un dedo. Tras recibir el alta hospitalaria, una enfermera acudió a su domicilio para limpiarle las heridas y enseñarle cómo realizar vendajes con gasas. Poco después, estos cuidados fueron delegados tanto a él como a su familia, una situación que no le sentó bien. “No hay un verdadero cuidado en eso”, asegura.
“(Las enfermeras) vienen si hay que curar alguna herida, ¿no? Pero, aunque vengan una vez por semana, el resto de la semana tienes que hacerlo tú, por ti mismo, con tu familia. Así que, si tienes más secreciones y se supone que necesitas cambiarte, tienes que hacerlo tú mismo”, añade.
En la actualidad, mediante una alianza con UConn Health, el proveedor de cuidados de la Universidad de Connecticut, COMPASS Youth Collaborative facilita servicios a domicilio a individuos que no pueden permitirse más tratamientos hospitalarios. Gracias a este programa, un joven cuya familia atraviesa problemas económicos, carece de seguro y suministros médicos, recibe la atención adecuada para limpiar sus heridas de manera segura.
“Se trata de la necesidad humana más básica para alguien que ha recibido un disparo: mantener las heridas limpias para evitar que se infecten”, dice López.
El programa de atención sanitaria de COMPASS Youth Collaborative también cubre las necesidades de salud mental de los sobrevivientes, poniendo a disposición de estos un equipo de trabajadores sociales. Mediante un modelo de terapia cognitivo conductual, los jóvenes pueden examinar la relación que existe entre sus pensamientos, sus emociones y sus acciones con el fin de reconocer sus detonantes emocionales, autorregularse y abordar el trauma acumulado. Santiago Nazario explica que, durante los cuatro años que dura el programa, el 80% de los jóvenes muestran mejoras en sus vidas.
López usa su propia experiencia para ayudar a jóvenes a afrontar situaciones difíciles. (Aníbal Martel para palabra)
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Like the width of a sidewalk or the connectedness of bike lanes, the way public infrastructure is constructed not only physically and socially impacts users, but mentally, too. For public transportation in Philadelphia, the system’s built environment is enough to keep some riders away.
According to a YouGov survey from last year, 39 percent of Americans think that buses, trolleys, and trains in major cities are too dangerous to ride. When a system like SEPTA has a month like March when 15 riders were shot in the space of four days, passengers already primed to be on alert can feel their anxiety spike. But it isn’t just weapons and overflowing trashcans; some riders are nervous before even entering public transit. Anxiety about the material environment of the system can be felt like a concertgoer who prefers an open-air daytime show over a packed underground concert hall at night.
Public spaces like SEPTA’s subway network can cause anxiety for many reasons, but much of that fear is a result of human hard-wiring. Because safety violations within the SEPTA system tend to get a lot of attention, Philadelphians are more likely to be emotionally reactionary in these environments and to make negative associations, according to Yvette Sheline of the University of Pennsylvania’s Department of Psychiatry. Innate alertness has some passengers associating stations, stops, and seats with the threat of violence.
“If you’re not being conditioned to think about things in a fearful way, then it is going to be much less prominent in your thinking,” Sheline said.
Although ridership has increased in the past two years, SEPTA is still working to reach pre-pandemic levels. As federal emergency aid began to run out this year, the authority found itself staring at a $200 million financial gap.
SEPTA again delayed an overhaul of its bus system, which they say could have brought riders back. Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro rallied state legislators to close the hole. Still, it’s unclear whether SEPTA has the funds to keep running as-is or how deep the authority’s leaders would have to cut service without it. A spokesperson said because the agency has been historically underfunded and operates an aged subway system, infrastructure improvements for safety such as more accessible stations are a long-term challenge.
Sheline, who heads the Center for Neuromodulation in Depression and Stress at Penn, believes that if there were less fear in the public discourse around transit, people’s anxiety would decrease.
There is a big difference between feeling anxious in a public place and getting worked up about being in that setting in the future, Sheline said. When people are planning to use public transit, they can choose to remember past positive experiences and feel better about riding. Once they’re in the subway station or on a crowded bus, they feel more vulnerable, more anxious, and less able to think their situation through, Sheline said.
From gates and sidewalks to subterranean hallways, the physical environments that make up a transit system can affect how safe people feel using them. Sheline says even the cleanliness of SEPTA’s vehicles and stations can determine what riders think about them. Built elements that comprise SEPTA’s subway system are what cause some riders to be more susceptible to anxiety, specifically those who have fears of enclosed spaces — a feeling more common than most people realize and one that doesn’t surprise Sheline.
Some of SEPTA’s subterranean subway stations like the 5th Street Independence Hall location feature narrow and closed off spaces. (Credit: Owen Racer)Anastasia Loukaitou-Sideris, the interim dean at U.C.L.A.’s Luskin School of Public Affairs, says there is a natural element of openness to a public transportation system’s inclusivity that serves as a sign of a democratic society. But that same openness, Loukaitou-Sideris said, is also what gives transit hubs their inherent risk.
“If we all start getting afraid of agoraphobia and not going to these public spaces, we will end up in a cocoon of private spaces,” Loukaitou-Sideris said.
A major stop on Amtrak’s Northeast corridor, Philadelphia’s William H. Gray III 30th Street train station offers an open waiting area. (Credit: Owen Racer)Professor Loukaitou-Sideris, who specializes in transit safety and studied SEPTA during the COVID-19 pandemic, is encouraged by Philadelphia’s Hub of Hope. The center serves as a space within the SEPTA system for unhoused individuals to receive essentials such as food and medical care.
Due to the open nature of public transit, for some, the system has become defined by the unwanted elements of cigarette butts and residue it encompasses.
Jameek Lowery entered the dimly lit lobby of the city’s police headquarters in a panic. He was having a mental breakdown — and needed help.
Barefoot and wearing only pajama pants and a sweatshirt in the pre-dawn hours of Jan. 5, 2019, Lowery pulled out his cellphone and began a social media broadcast of an anti-police rant.
“Why y’all trying to kill me?” Lowery asked several Paterson police officers on his Facebook Live video feed. “If I’m dead in the next hour or two, they did it.”
As Lowery sounded off, police stood back and summoned an ambulance to take the 27-year-old Black man to the hospital. What happened in the ambulance remains a flashpoint in the Black community’s deteriorating relationship with the city’s 400-plus-member police department, an agency so troubled and distrusted that state officials last year took it over.
Lowery arrived unconscious at St. Joseph’s University Medical Center handcuffed to a gurney and died two days later. Officials would later say that officers forcefully restrained and punched Lowery when he kicked and struck them. His sister and activists believe that police acted with excessive force because of his race.
Lowery was among more than 330 Black people who died after police stopped them with tactics that aren’t supposed to be deadly, like physical restraint and use of stun guns, The Associated Press found. Black people of non-Hispanic descent accounted for about a third of the 1,036 deaths that AP catalogued across the nation, despite representing just 12% of the population.
The investigation into a decade of such deaths, led by AP in collaboration with FRONTLINE (PBS) and the Howard Centers for Investigative Journalism, comes as studies by criminologists and public-health researchers have repeatedly demonstrated that Black people endure discrimination in all aspects of the criminal justice system, accounting for high rates of unjustified police stops, arrests, uses of force and incarceration.
Lowery’s case also highlights how hard it can be for families to hold officers accountable and to pry loose information about encounters where officers use body blows and other types of force that are easier to obscure than a shooting.
Due to weak public information laws and other restrictions, it can be difficult to find out what happened in such incidents. Officials in New Jersey, like those in some other states, inconsistently release information about deaths related to police action. In Lowery’s case, AP obtained an autopsy report, a prosecutor’s statement, police reports and a 10-page report prepared by an expert hired by the family that offers considerable new detail not yet made public about police actions in the ambulance.
The high-profile fatalities of George Floyd, Freddie Gray and Eric Garner sparked nationwide protests over the use of force and a reckoning over police interactions with people of color. Advocates in Paterson had hoped Lowery’s death would provide a similar catalyst to reform the city’s police force. But five years later they say they remain disappointed.
“It’s kind of inconceivable to think that a person would go to an agency — in this day and time anyway — for help, and end up being dead shortly after,” said Casey Melvin, a community activist who works with an anti-violence program.
Paterson’s racial unrestNew Jersey’s third-largest city, Paterson has a population of nearly 160,000 and sits about 20 miles northwest of Manhattan. Like many other industrial cities, its demographics have shifted since the middle of last century when the vast majority of its residents were white. Today, Black residents account for nearly 24% and Hispanics just over 60% of the population.
As Paterson’s Black population grew, it found itself repeatedly clashing with the city’s white power structure, particularly its police force.
In the mid-1960s, Paterson was the site of civil unrest between police and Black residents. Paterson was also the inspiration for the 1975 Bob Dylan song “Hurricane,” about the boxer Rubin “Hurricane” Carter, a Black man who was convicted by an all-white jury in 1967 of killing three white people at a city bar. A federal judge later threw out the conviction, writing that it had been “predicated upon an appeal to racism rather than reason.”
In subsequent decades, tensions between the city’s Black residents and police have flared again and again. A few years ago, the force came under withering criticism for allowing a rogue group of officers to form a “robbery squad” that for three years beat residents and stole their money.
Since the start of 2019, city police have fatally shot four people; two others, including Lowery, have died after being restrained.
Many Black residents learned at an early age to look over their shoulders for police, said Ernest Rucker, a community activist.
“At 8 years old, because of the color of my skin, I would be stopped by law enforcement because I crossed the wrong street,” he said. “That type of treatment especially at that young age would always have you mistrust the police, not like the police — hate the police — to a great degree.”
This was Jameek Lowery’s hometown. One of 17 children, he was raised by his mother and stepfather in a series of crowded houses in Paterson’s Fourth Ward. The family moved a lot during his childhood.
Relatives said Lowery enjoyed school, especially music. His stepfather was a DJ, and as a kid, Lowery loved dancing and singing to Michael Jackson’s “Beat It.” As he grew, he loved ’90s R&B and wanted to be a singer like Usher.
Life was not easy for Lowery. He was diagnosed as a child with bipolar disorder, a mental health condition that resulted in extreme mood swings. As long as he took his medication and regularly saw his doctors, he was fine, said Shavontay McFadden, an older sister.
As an adult, he used and sold illicit drugs, leading in 2013 to a drug distribution conviction and three-year probation sentence. During a jail stay in 2016, Lowery banged his head against a cell’s wall and was sent to a medical center for mental health treatment. By late 2018, Lowery was unemployed — and his mother was managing his Social Security disability income.
At that point, Lowery decided he wanted to move with his three children to North Carolina. He explained to friends and family members he wanted to be closer to his mother in Virginia. But he also said he was tired of the Paterson police, of being worried he was going to be arrested or hassled.
He sent relatives strings of texts and left them messages that complained “certain cops were harassing him,” said his sister, Jamilyha Lowery. “He said they were going to hurt him.”
His family had no reason to doubt him. But it was not always easy to separate his real-life concerns from his growing paranoia.
He was increasingly hallucinating and acting paranoid, they said. Lowery believed that people were out to get him. He imagined he had become an FBI informant providing tips about corrupt and violent police officers, Jamilyha Lowery said, although there is no evidence that he called the FBI.
It was in this state of mind that he called 911 for help on a dreary and chilly January Saturday.
‘Help me’Just after 2:40 a.m. on Jan. 5, 2019, Lowery told a 911 dispatcher that he had taken “ecstasy and was paranoid.” Paramedics took him for observation to St. Joseph’s University Medical Center.
After Lowery was examined and discharged, he jumped on furniture in the hospital lobby, causing a commotion, officials said. Hospital security staff escorted him to a taxi that had brought a friend to take him home. When the cab stopped at a red light in downtown Paterson, Lowery leapt out of an open window and ran toward city police headquarters.
At 3:45 a.m., Lowery opened the front door and walked barefoot into the lobby. He began broadcasting on Facebook Live. When he looked into the camera, he was sweating. Spit had gathered in the corners of his mouth. He sounded desperate, at times breathless.
As he rambled about threats and dangers, he asked police again and again to “help me.”
When the ambulance called by police arrived, Lowery at first said he didn’t want to get into it and return to the hospital, but changed his mind. By the time he got to the hospital, he was fighting for his life. He never regained consciousness.
Lowery’s relatives only learned he was at St. Joseph’s after coming across his archived livestream and calling local hospitals.
“He always said his safe haven is a hospital,” Jamilyha Lowery said.
They raced to his bedside and were aghast at what they found — he was unrecognizable. His face seemed bruised and swollen. Dried blood and fluids crusted his eyes, nose and face. Doctors told them he had gone into cardiac arrest, his sister said, and his brain and organs had gone without oxygen for quite some time.
Lowery died on Jan. 7.
This story originally appeared in The Philadelphia Tribune.
A pilot program to support students who experience trauma outside school was launched on Monday at the Philadelphia Military Academy through a collaboration between the school district and police department.
The Handle With Care initiative will be responsible for notifying the district of students who have been exposed to some type of violence so they can receive wraparound services.
“It will be 24 hours a day, 365 days per year,” said Police Commissioner Kevin Bethel. “This program has been a dream of mine for I don’t know how long.”
For now, the program will be for the 22nd Police District headquarters, which covers north-central Philadelphia and will involve 15 schools in the area. The pilot program goes live this summer, said Jayme Banks, deputy chief of prevention, trauma and intervention for the school district.
The program is funded by a $1 million grant issued by the Bureau of Justice Assistance through the Office of Justice Programs. It will include comprehensive training for 300 law enforcement and 100 school personnel to increase knowledge and awareness of student exposure to trauma and violence.
“This is an unusual opportunity for the city,” said Command Sergeant Major Nadia Porter, a student at the military academy. “We want the kids to have the confidence to talk to people when they need to, and to feel safe and unashamed to say what they feel, because that can be a part of it.”
This story is from The Pulse, a weekly health and science podcast.
Find it on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Growing up near Manchester, England, Sophie Ottaway was always having to go to the doctor. She was aware that she had been born with a complicated health condition.
“The first memory I’ve got really as a conscious young adult was around about the age of 11 when I first started having to see the endocrinologist,” she said.
Her mother would typically accompany her to most of these appointments. She hated going to see her doctor to begin with.
“Because none of my friends were going on these visits — I wised up to that quite quickly. I realized my school friends didn’t have to go every six months to see this weird man,” she said.
Sophie was 22 years old and dealing with a lingering case of tonsillitis in 2008. She went to see a general practitioner to get it checked out with her mother by her side.
After waiting a while in the exam room, her doctor finally walked in, pulled up the computer screen, and Sophie noticed something on her medical notes that would change her life forever.
On the monitor, she saw “46 XY chromosomes … prolapsed bowels through abdominal defect … bladder reconstruction, testes and phallus removed…vaginal construction.”
“At that age, at 22 I was old enough to understand that an XY chromosome was a male chromosome,” she said.
But this was on her chart. She was seeing an unimaginable truth — she was born a male.
Just the thought sent her mind reeling. She remembers being frozen in a state of shock.
“My initial reaction was absolutely anger. I didn’t say anything. I kept my composure.”
Sophie traded glances with her mother.
“My mum looked at me with this knowing one look, and I looked at her as much to say, ‘Yeah. Yeah. You know, I know.’”
When the appointment was over, Sophie remembers getting into the car, and they didn’t say much to each other. But when they got home – things took an explosive turn.
“I just lost it — like absolutely lost it. I kind of wanted answers. Like, ‘why didn’t you tell me? Why did you keep this from me? You know, what does this mean for my future? What else don’t you know?’” Sophie said. “Because I guess once you work out one aspect of your life is a lie, you start to question quite a lot of things at that point, because if you can keep a secret that big on, what else can you be keeping?”
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Students at Simon Gratz High School Mastery Charter took advantage of free haircuts from some of the best barbers in Philly on Monday.
But, for the men who volunteered their time and services, it was about more than the cuts; they hoped their anti-violence message would reach the youth and go beyond the barber chair.
“We hope being around them, talking to them, pouring into them, if we don’t do nothing when they leave us, they know that there is hope and there are people that care and there are Black men that care about Black boys,” said organizer Kaliek Hayes, who helped create the makeshift barbershop inside one of the classrooms.
The barbershop is a safe space within the Black community, where Black men can get haircuts and have honest conversations without judgment about important topics that impact the Black community.
The Youth Outreach Adolescent Community Awareness Program (YO-ACAP) is an anti-violence agency founded in Philadelphia. YO-ACAP created the Sharp Insight Barbers and partnered with ‘Barbers Against Violence’ to enlist area barbers to volunteer their services at local schools and utilize their barbershops to identify and mentor at-risk teens and those youth who may need resources.
Mount Airy barber Jahmeil Ragin cuts a student’s hair at a free barber event at Simon Gratz High School. (Amanda Fitzpatrick/WHYY)On Monday, 25 students received haircuts, including senior Zymir Floyd, who said that he and some other students don’t always get the opportunity to get haircuts where they live.
“We are in a low-income environment, so it’s really hard to get haircuts out here, so them doing it for free is a real big help,” said Floyd, who also felt it was a safe space to open up about issues he faces in the community.
“It’s great, you get to connect. It’s like a therapy session. You get to talk about whatever you’re going through to help you calm down,” said Floyd.
Inside the room, four barbers from different parts of town treated each student like a VIP client. Over the clippers buzzing and music playing in the background, you could also hear the dialogue between the barber and student.
“I survived the streets without going to jail. I got shot. My son is doing eight years in jail for not listening to me,” said South Philly barber Damond Young as he trimmed one student’s hair.
Young also addressed the recent rash of violence among teens in the city and decided to have a heart-to-heart conversation after one student told him that his dad didn’t care what he did, as long as he finished school.
“You got to care because… I would love for you to finish school, but I want y’all to live too, y’all [teens] are an endangered species. Y’all are dying at a rapid pace,” said Young, who cautioned the students about the dangers of gun violence, “There’s no reset to the streets. You don’t get to mess up, push a button, and start over. It’s not a video game. It’s real life.”
The Youth Outreach Adolescent Community Awareness Program (YO-ACAP) provided haircuts to 25 at-risk teens at Simon Gratz High School Mastery Charter. (Emma Lee/WHYY)There were many tough conversations held on Monday. The young men not only received free hairstyles but also a free lesson about life through the eyes of men who admitted they, too, faced some challenges growing up.
Mount Airy barber Jahmeil Ragin opened up about his family tragedy.
Ragin said his younger brother was murdered in 2007 by someone they knew.
“He was a close friend. I was there, it was my little brother. It was just hard for me to deal with,” said Ragin.
Ragin’s personal experience helped him connect with students, which allowed him to offer advice about handling tragedy.
“The gentleman that I talked to said he lost a close friend too, something that we related to, and how to move forward,” said Ragin, who noted many students were hopeful about the future, but some they talked to were not.
“You have some that are optimistic, and you have others that deal with it differently. It’s hard for them to cope with some of the things that are going on in their lives.”
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The United States has become known for having the worst rate of maternal mortality among high-income nations globally, according to data published by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
The federal agency estimates that there are 32.9 deaths per every 100,000 live births as of 2021, a figure that has steeply climbed in recent years.
But a group of researchers began to question that data and wondered, how does the country that spends the most on health care per person have some of the poorest maternal and pregnancy outcomes in the world?
After analyzing and reviewing maternal mortality data reported to the CDC’s National Center for Health Statistics, the researchers came to a different conclusion.
“Maternal mortality is not as bad as previously thought,” said Cande Ananth, chief of the Division of Epidemiology and Biostatistics in the Department of Obstetrics, Gynecology, and Reproductive Sciences at Rutgers Robert Wood Johnson Medical School.
Ananth and his research partners published their findings this month in the American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology. Their study found a current U.S. maternal mortality rate of 10.4 deaths per every 100,000 live births, which would bring it more in line with incidence in countries like Canada and France.
“Still it’s a problem, don’t get me wrong, but the rates are substantially lower,” he said. “We actually see very stable rates, and the revised maternal mortality data in the U.S. is actually very well within range of every developed nation.”
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Many Philadelphians are still processing the recent senseless mass shooting that involved local students from Northeast High School.
Students across the School District of Philadelphia continue to grapple with disappointment and dismay as shootings among youth continue throughout the city of brotherly love.
NFL Hall-of-Famer and Philadelphia Eagles legend Brian Dawkins brought his star power and personal story to students, hoping to improve mental health wellness and decrease violence.
Brian Dawkins at George Washington High School. (Kimberly Paynter/WHYY)Dawkins spoke to a packed assembly Tuesday at George Washington High School in Northeast Philly.
The Brian Dawkins Impact Foundation and the school partnered to launch “The Young Ambassador program,” which trains students to be ambassadors for themselves, their classmates and members of the community.
The team’s primary focus is how to live with the seemingly continual violence young people contend with. They partnered with Edgework Consulting, a nonprofit organization that works with schools and student leaders to train them how to focus on leadership and team building.
Together, they will teach students strategies to help prevent gun violence and show them skills to cope with violence in the community.
“I feel like a lot of people are scared. A lot of people don’t know what will happen in the future. That’s kind of what we want to fix. We want to give people hope and give them a reason to come to school and get away from the violence,” said 11th-grade student and ambassador, Azmat Lala.
Azmat Lala is a junior at George Washington High School in Philadelphia. (Kimberly Paynter/WHYY)Lala is one of a dozen current and former students who will work in the program. Lala hopes to attend Penn State after he graduates, but like many of his peers, the reality of the violence that surrounds them is a wake-up call to the dangers they face each day.
The holy month of Ramadan began this week. Salima Suswell, the founder and CEO of the new Black Muslim Leadership Council, joins us talk about how she observes Ramadan, the daily rituals and the festive evening meals. We’ll also talk to her about the concerns of Philadelphia’s large Black Muslim community.
Congress is debating a ban on TikTok, the wildly popular social media app. Lawmakers are concerned the app poses a national security threat and could be used to surveil Americans. The House votes Wednesday on a bill to force the China-based parent company ByteDance to either divest or be banned in U.S. app stores. We’ll talk with Washington Post tech reporter Will Oremus about the arguments for and against the ban, how millions of users are responding, and why former President Trump flip-flopped on TikTok.
Young people spend a lot of their life online – the average teen spends nine hours a day, streaming shows, playing games and on social media. That may sound scary but it’s not all bad, says media scholar Devorah Heitner. In her recent book, Growing Up in Public: Coming of Age in the Digital World, she offers realistic advice on how to teach kids to be tech smart and advises parents to be aware but not overbearing – she suggests limiting the parental tracking. We’ll talk with Heitner about the good and bad of online life, the big digital pitfalls young people face and how to avoid them.
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“You’ve got regret, you’ve got shame, you’ve got guilt, you got all these crazy emotions and feelings and you don’t know what to do with them.”
That’s how Jennifer Antonik described her experience following the death of her husband by suicide.
Dealing with the aftermath of a suicide loss is a multifaceted experience, involving emotions such as grief, sadness, guilt, anger and a persistent longing. These feelings affect not only those closely connected to the departed person but are even more difficult to process when there is insufficient support and resources.
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When Althea Wilson walks around Wilmington, usually singing gospel music and often searching for somewhere to sleep, she keeps her eyes on the ground, hunting for heart-shaped rocks.
When Wilson finds one worthy of collecting, the diminutive 58-year-old takes it to her art studio, draws a heart on its surface and paints it bright red.
Althea Wilson shows off her painted heart-shaped rocks. (Cris Barrish/WHYY)Then she displays it in the front windowsill of the downtown Creative Vision Factory — an unassuming brick building on Shipley Street that doubles as a daytime sanctuary for dozens of people grappling with mental illness, substance abuse or homelessness, and sometimes all three.
“I’ve got an angel heart in the background. Cat’s eye,’’ she said, pointing to about a dozen rocks. “There’s one blowing bubblegum.”
Wilson’s creations aren’t high art by any stretch. But they’re hers, and they’re a big part of how she expresses herself and finds joy during what’s been a hard life.
“I’m currently experiencing homelessness again, hopefully for a short period of time,’’ she said in late February. “This is my lifesaver.”
The studio, filled with hundreds of paintings, drawings, sculptures, glass murals and other artwork, has been a fixture on Shipley Street for 13 years. Other works created by clients adorn a city school, a nonprofit center and a graveyard for patients who died at the state psychiatric hospital.
There’s no shortage of art supplies and space to create. (Cris Barrish/WHYY)But the Creative Vision Factory’s days are numbered, and the doors will shut for good sometime this spring.
Wilson says the impending closure breaks her own heart.
“There’s no place like this place,’’ she says, bursting into tears. “It means a lot to me. It has helped me grow inwardly tremendously. It’s bringing out the best of me and the more potential I see in myself that I can do better. I can do better. I can do better.”
Pointing to her precious rocks, she makes a pledge: “I’m not gonna give up this collection here.”
Althea Wilson’s painted heart-sharped stones occupy a key piece of real estate — the front windowsill. (Cris Barrish/WHYY)Michael Kalmbach, who has run the studio since it opened 13 years ago, says it’s closing for a multitude of reasons, primarily financial viability and encroaching gentrification.
The Creative Vision Factory is one block off Market Street, downtown Wilmington’s main artery, in an area that’s home to hundreds of new apartments, fancy restaurants, breweries and even WHYY’s Delaware office.
“For a 13-year period, something really cool kind of blossomed here on Shipley Street,” says Michael Kalmbach.Kalmbach said he realizes that downtown developers and some residents and office workers won’t miss the group of men and women who wander in and out of the studio and don’t hesitate to stroll to the corner to smoke weed. But he’s proud of what the artists have been able to accomplish.
“It’s been a wild ride,’’ he said. “There’s a lot of stuff that we’ve accumulated. There’s been a lot of art-making but also a lot of community, a lot of friendships. For a 13-year period something really cool kind of blossomed here on Shipley Street.”
Hundreds of new apartments have been built near the Creative Vision Factory (foreground), including a new one that towers above the studio in the 600 block of Shipley Street. (Cris Barrish/WHYY)Kalmbach hopes to reopen in some form at another existing day center located four miles away in the town of Elsmere. But he knows the new space and the vibe there won’t be the same, and that many of his current artists won’t be going to the facility that’s located in a residential neighborhood in the same building that houses Elsmere’s municipal offices and police force.
“People come here from all points of the city,’’ Kalmbach said of the downtown location. “What’s really been key about it is it’s very centralized. It’s close to tons of transit lines, check-cashing places and pharmacies.”
“The sad fact is that while there may be some who try to follow us and hang out with us in Elsmere, just the sheer math securing bus passes to get there’’ will prove insurmountable for many. “It’s definitely a hike, and outside of the terrain that they’re usually navigating.”
An artist/client listens to music on a recent morning. (Cris Barrish/WHYY)Joanna Champney, director of the state Division of Substance Abuse and Mental Health that provides funding to six drop-in centers statewide, says the Creative Vision Factory has provided a “wonderful” safe haven for people in need.
“The piece that makes the Creative Vision Factory unique is the focus on artistic engagement, getting people to get their creative juices flowing,’’ Champney said. “They can come in and paint and do ceramics — all sorts of great artistic activities — and while they’re doing that, they’re building relationships with staff who are listening to what the person’s needs are and their skills and being able to connect the clients to services in the community that could benefit them and enhance their life.”
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This story was supported by a statehouse coverage grant from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.
Pediatrician Priscilla Mpasi was working at the Kuumba Academy Charter School’s wellness center when a fifth grader came to the clinic again to complain of an earache.
The young girl’s ear had started hurting again that day after she heard a loud bang in the cafeteria. Her primary care provider had previously prescribed her antibiotics for the earaches, which had been persisting for months.
During a typical doctor’s office visit, a provider constantly moves from room to room, treating patients. But in the school clinic, the doctor was able to take time with the student and trace back to when her pain first started.
“A couple months prior, she was in her home,” said Mpasi to an audience recently at the ribbon cutting for the new Richardson Park Elementary School school-based health center. Mpasi is also the assistant clinical director for complex primary care community and community medicine at ChristianaCare. “She heard a few loud noises and she was told that those noises were gunshots. She learned the next day that someone had been fatally wounded by gunshots and so whenever she hears a loud noise, she panics thinking that there’s going to be a gunshot.”
Mpasi was able to diagnose the fifth grader’s ear pain as a physical manifestation of trauma caused by gun violence. She walked the student down the hall to the mental health worker and referred her and her family to a community health worker.
Advocates say that’s how school-based health centers are designed to work.
The new health center at Richardson Park Elementary School in Wilmington. (Sarah Mueller/WHYY)It’s like having an urgent care clinic in a school with medical professionals able to collaborate immediately with mental health specialists, social workers and counselors. But Delaware students may be falling through cracks due to cuts in services by health care providers, a lack of state funding and the growing demand for more health centers in schools to treat rising mental health and behavioral health issues.
The Delaware School Based Health Alliance is calling for lawmakers to add an additional $5.5 million dollars to support existing centers in high schools and to build and operate more in elementary and middle schools. The governor’s proposed budget includes about $5.4 million to maintain existing facilities.
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High school juniors and seniors frequently find themselves pondering tough decisions about the road ahead. Will they go to college? If not, what comes next?
That journey can significantly impact students’ mental well-being, leading many to choose to delay enrollment or opt out of college entirely.
A recent study by EAB, an educational company once known as the Education Advisory Board, revealed a concerning statistic: nearly one-third of the nearly 6,500 students studied opted out of college due to mental health concerns, with mental well-being concerns being most pronounced among underrepresented groups. Specifically, the issue is particularly notable among 54% of trans students, 53% of nonbinary students, 33% of Black students, 30% of Native American students, and 30% of female students.
This story is from The Pulse, a weekly health and science podcast.
Find it on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Amie Ward has worked in the hospitality industry for more than 20 years — as a dishwasher, barista, server and bartender. So she’s no stranger to difficult situations and angry customers, something that she said comes up everyday.
“People can become escalated for a multitude of different reasons; 99% of the time [it] has nothing to do with you,” Ward said. “It’s part of hospitality … try to make sure that people are feeling good, their needs are being attended to within reason.”
Now as the executive director of a nonprofit called Safe Bars, she trains other workers on what to do in those situations, based on her experiences, self defense principles, and psychology. For example, she advises workers to stay calm, know where the exits are, stand to the side of the angry customer and not in front of them, and make it clear you are listening.
She said Safe Bars started offering de-escalation training because of how customers started treating hospitality workers during the pandemic.
“They’re upset they have to wear masks … it was a change to how things operated, there was a reduction in workforce, so things were happening at a slower pace,” Ward said. “We wanted the people who were working on the front lines of hospitality … to have these skills to make sure that people were kept calm and that they could keep themselves safe and help each other out.”
Staff at restaurants, shops, airlines, faced much more reported aggression and anger during the pandemic, and there are many organizations that offer de-escalation training. But does it work?
This story is from The Pulse, a weekly health and science podcast.
Find it on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.
In 2018, Kea Tull noticed that her daughter was struggling at college. She had just failed an exam, twice.
“At night she came home and she was like, ‘I just want to pay to break something,’” Tull recalled. “And I’m looking at her like, ‘You gotta be kidding me? Who pays to break something?’”
Desperate to help her daughter, she searched the internet to find some answers. Almost immediately, dozens of searches popped up for something called “rage rooms.”
These places took abandoned warehouses and vacant offices and turned them into businesses made for organized chaos. Some were also marketed as an “alternative” to anger management.
Tull was looking at images of people smashing glassware, electronics and vintage furniture – with sledge hammers and baseball bats.
It seemed like a perfect fit for her daughter, but there was one problem – their hometown, Philadelphia, didn’t have one. So Tull decided to ask her daughter if she’d start a business with her.
“‘Would you want to be your own boss?,’” Tull asked her daughter. “And she said ‘yeah.’ I’m like, we gotta look into this. It really piqued my interest. I couldn’t sleep at night. It was on my mind so much that I just started looking into doing it.”
Five years later, Tull and her daughter Nyerema Jordan are the co-owners of Rage Room Philadelphia. Their tagline – “A place where you can Fu#% some Sh!t up and have a ball doing it!!!”
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The inaugural Philly Beer Fest kicked off at the 23rd Street Armory on Saturday afternoon. Beer enthusiasts from Philly and the surrounding areas gathered and toasted to an organization that helps survivors of trauma. Proceeds from the event will support the Trauma Survivors Foundation.
Dennis Carradin, of Glen Mills, has worked as a trauma therapist for 30 years. He founded the organization after being dispatched to help victims’ family members following the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting rampage in 2012 that took the lives of 20 children and six adults.
He said in the aftermath of that tragedy he realized something was missing in the basic protocol of care for many people.
“We rushed in early to help survivors and families and the first responders,” he said. “And then we would leave and not really follow up in the best way that we could, just simply because our job was to kind of help stabilize people.”
The Trauma Survivors Foundation helps first responders. (Courtesy of the Trauma Survivors Foundation)At that time Carradin met a distraught college student whose nephew had been killed in the massacre. She did not have insurance and did not know where to turn for counseling.
He and a colleague paid for five of her therapy sessions, and now his foundation offers five free sessions with a trained therapist for anyone they serve.
To help raise awareness and money, the foundation participates in many different events across the region, including beer and taco festivals and 5K runs.
Rob Boyle, the president of Bellefonte Brewing Company in Brandywine, said the beer festival is an opportunity for local craft brewers to get exposure.
“And we all love being able to give back to our communities,” he said. “This is just one way where we’re supporting an organization that we know is doing good work in our area.”
A variety of different beers are featured. (Courtesy of the Trauma Survivors Foundation)He said the Trauma Survivors Foundation has been a charity partner of Bellefonte Brewing for several years.
Last year, Dennis became a co-owner of the brewing company after his previous involvement as a charity coordinator.
“He has a real passion for helping people in need,” said Boyle. “He won’t say no to someone who calls him up and says they need to talk.”
Carradin said many people that suffer trauma may not know what to do.
“We recently had someone, they were involved in a house fire, everybody was safe but it was a traumatic experience, they lost everything, and we were able to hook them up with one of our trained therapists,” he said.
He said the Trauma Survivors Foundation now works with 2,500 providers in 41 different states.
“It’s basically a network of trauma therapists that we’ve vetted out that can help people,” Carradin said.“Plus we have our, what we consider our ground crew that goes out to these larger events. We go into situations where there’s a crisis, a mass shooting, a disaster, and we provide mental health therapy, and we provide crisis intervention.”
A Michigan jury has found the mother of a teenage shooter guilty of manslaughter more than two years after her son carried out the state’s deadliest school shooting, raising serious questions about holding parents responsible when minors commit violent acts. We’ll talk about parental accountability and the potential ripple effects of the unique case with Ekow Yankah, Thomas M. Cooley professor of law at the University of Michigan. And, Representative Darisha K. Parker joins us to discuss a bill in the Pennsylvania House that could extend some liability onto parents if a minor commits a firearm offense.
Is your playlist feeling a little stale this year? We’ll share a roundup of emerging Philly artists and new music releases from big local names. Our guest is songwriter and rapper Amir Richardson, aka The Bul Bey.
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Kids at Play, an indoor sensory playground and pediatric therapy center, is launching a new program that combines recreation and mental health services for children.
The announcement comes as the organization relocated its facilities to Roxborough from East Falls about nine months ago.
Kids at Play offers outpatient speech, occupational and physical therapy — in addition to Applied Behavioral Analysis (ABA) — and is now launching a program that addresses mental health issues for children.
Director of operations Julia Bookbinder said they plan to hire certified mental health professionals who can readily assist children with behavioral health challenges on site.
“Our goal is that when you come in, you have no idea who’s getting therapy and who’s here playing,” she said. “We want to really destigmatize the concept of therapy.”
The new service launched as Kids at Play has seen a growing number of children struggling with emotional regulation, depression, anxiety and the effects of early childhood trauma.
While not involved with diagnosing or medicine management, the organization aims to hire the licensed mental health professionals by March.
Founded in 2016, Kids at Play opened as an inclusive indoor playground with neurodiversity in mind and welcoming for children with ADHD or on the autism spectrum.
The group designed its original 7,000-square-foot space in East Falls as a multi-sensory play space decorated with vibrant colors and ambient lighting.
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Long-acting injectable medications for schizophrenia can decrease the likelihood of patient rehospitalizations, according to a new Rutgers University Health study.
In their findings, published in the Journal of Clinical Psychopharmacology, researchers concluded that compared to oral antipsychotics, injections accounted for a 75% reduction of hospital readmissions.
Rutgers Health analyzed data pulled from hospital systems where patients were discharged with schizophrenia or schizoaffective-related disorders from August 2019 to June 2022.
Of total discharged patients, 240 individuals were given oral medications while 103 opted for long-acting injections.
The results showed that patients given antipsychotics in pill form had a hospital readmission rate of 8.3% over a 30-day period. Meanwhile, of patients that were administered drugs by injection, less than 2% returned to the hospital within a month.
From Camden and Cherry Hill to Trenton and the Jersey Shore, what about life in New Jersey do you want WHYY News to cover? Let us know.
Content warning: This story contains mention of suicide.
If you or someone you know is in crisis, call or text the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 988. The hotline is staffed 24/7 by trained counselors who can offer free, confidential support. Spanish speakers can call 1-888-628-9454. People who are deaf or hard of hearing can call 1-800-799-4889.
Tricia Baker co-founded Attitudes in Reverse (AIR) in 2009 after her son, Kenny, who had been diagnosed with depression, died by suicide three weeks before his high school graduation. Kenny’s death made Baker realize that many teens struggle with mental health issues and that they are afraid to talk about it and seek help.
“Mental illness is like air, just because you don’t see it doesn’t mean it’s not there, it’s all around us,” she said.
According to the most recent CDC data, 94 youth ages 10 to 24 died by suicide in New Jersey in 2021. That’s the second leading cause of death among youth in that age range for the Garden State. The National Institute of Health reports 20% of children ages three to 17 have either a mental or a behavioral disorder. Between 2008 and 2020, suicide rates for children ages 12 to 17 increased by 16%, according to the institute.
Through AIR, an educational non-profit organization, Baker and her team are trying to provide support to struggling youth.
“We go into schools and we provide mental wellness education for students in kindergarten all the way through college,” she said. “We want young people to understand what these brain illnesses are, we want them to understand they are biological, that there is help available, and that there’s always people that are willing to listen.”
Children at Hopewell Valley Elementary school enjoy an AIR presentation with a therapy dog. (Courtesy Attitudes in Reverse)
The new West Philadelphia location marks the city’s fifth crisis response center for people experiencing mental health emergencies.
When students at most Camden County schools experience a mental health crisis, they need to get evaluations and clearances before they can return to class.
Most cases don’t require a hospital admission for a student to receive treatment, but with few other options for quick evaluations and clearances, many students and their families end up in emergency departments.
During the last school year, Camden County schools referred students in crisis to emergency rooms at Jefferson Health, Cooper University Health Care, and Virtua Health approximately 2,500 times, according to county officials.
Now, a school program launching this fall aims to provide these services in therapists’ offices and save students from what can be time-consuming, costly, and stressful ER visits.
“Our belief is that there’s a more compassionate way to handle these types of crises,” said Dan Del Vecchio, superintendent of the Camden County Educational Services Commission. “Which is why we started down the path of, how can we redirect students from the emergency department?”
This story is from The Pulse, a weekly health and science podcast.
Find it on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.
For a majority of his life, Justin Kemp has kept his emotions and personal struggles to himself.
Kemp, 17, is entering his senior year at Germantown Academy, near Philadelphia, where he’s active in student government and the Black Student Alliance. He also has aspirations to go to a historically Black university to study political science.
He’s a studious and insightful young adult that’s had academic success and a supportive family network. But mental health has played an important role in shaping some early childhood adversity.
In a recent book he published called “Dear,” Kemp opens up about his struggles with mental health, suicidal thoughts, and how writing saved his life.
The 90-page novelette features four teen, minority characters who are facing mental health issues of their own, and how social media, racial violence, and school shape teen mental health.
“This book is written for teens to resonate with and to know that they’re not alone, but for adults to also understand the pressures that the world puts on teenagers,” Kemp said.
The book also features something deeply personal to Kemp — his own suicide notes.
It was seven years ago when Kemp noticed something different about his moods and behaviors.
He was feeling more sad and depressed than usual. He was sleeping longer than he normally did, and inexplicably, couldn’t find the motivation to simply get out of bed.
“I had never really heard much about mental health and the negative effects, so I didn’t think anything was wrong,” he said. “I was just a normal kid who was tired all the time.”
He never thought that poor mental health was the culprit, and felt too young to fully understand. But everything was far from normal. He began to develop a sporadic and inconsistent appetite. He would lose his cravings to eat for days.
“I was getting thinner,” he said. “I wasn’t eating at all. I can remember back a couple of years ago, I didn’t get out of bed for a week and I didn’t eat anything.”
Since Kemp was 10 years old, he has struggled with mental health in ways that have been difficult to overcome. Anxiety, in particular, began during middle school.
“Let me tell you, anxiety is the worst thing I have ever experienced in my life,” Kemp said.
What triggered his anxiety was feeling “forced” into crowded spaces like his classrooms. His emotions were usually followed by anxiety attacks. And he spent many school days going running into the bathroom in between classes to hyperventilate.
“I would have to go into the bathroom and just cry my eyes out before I could go and step in a classroom,” he said. “I did it because I didn’t know what else to do.”
Then, shortly after he turned 13, his mother and father – both practicing veterinarians in the Philadelphia area — got a divorce. For Justin, this marked a pivotal moment that took his struggles to an even darker place — looking for ways to end his life.
“I had gotten to the point where I would carry a bottle of Robitussin in my bag in case things had gotten so bad that I wanted to die,” he said. “That’s how dark it got. It was terrifying.”
Justin also began to take pills and cut himself. All he kept thinking about was how he “didn’t want to be around” anymore. He then started writing good-bye letters — or suicide notes — to himself and his parents:
Dear whoever is left to listen to me,
When I think back, I can remember myself sitting around a big boardroom table and shaking with the feeling of butterflies in my stomach. I can see myself in the grocery store standing in an aisle alone, scared that I might not make it home. I can relive that moment that I walked into the gym feeling no motivation to move. But the fact that the only reason I was there is because some guy on TikTok told me to get my ass up to work. I can see that time at Thanksgiving when all of my family had arrived and I couldn’t work up the strength to put on a smile. I can remember that it wasn’t because I wasn’t happy I could see them, but that I was tired of constantly being in pain.
Justin said he was very good at ‘hiding everything.’ No one at school knew about his emotional or behavioral health, so his suicide attempts mostly went unchecked, and he was never sent to the hospital.
Because his parents were in the middle of divorcing, they didn’t know what was happening either. That was until Kemp started seeing a family therapist.
“I actually started getting help when my parents got a divorce, and we started out by talking about my family situation,” he said.
This story is from The Pulse, a weekly health and science podcast.
Find it on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Earlier this year, the eighth graders at Arbutus Middle School in Baltimore County, Maryland shuffled down the long hallways and entered the gymnasium for their first assembly since COVID-19.
It seemed like they were either wearing crocs or fancy sneakers, hoodies or jean jackets. They plopped on the gym floor in clusters and whipped out their phones, but not for long.
They were instructed to put phones in the bin being passed around or put them away completely for the next hour.
“Don’t think I won’t catch you looking at your phone. Because I will. I always do,” said Jason Weiner, the health and physical education teacher.
“You know what this assembly is about,” Weiner said, trying to get the students to settle down. “We talked about it. It’s a presentation about mental health and mental health awareness.”
Meanwhile, NAMI Metro was getting set up with microphones, speakers, and a video projector. NAMI is the National Alliance for Mental Illness. They’re a national grassroots advocacy group with local chapters. Thousands of volunteers work for NAMI and two of them were in the gym about to present the “Ending the Silence” program.
“Ending the Silence,” is kind of like an interactive TED talk. But the storytellers share their lived experiences with mental health conditions. And they tell their stories directly to students. The national program has been around for a while but started in the Baltimore area in 2019. The organizers had no idea how relevant it would become.
According to a 2021 survey from the Center for Disease Control and Prevention, 44% of teens in the U.S. report feeling persistently sad and hopeless since the COVID-19 pandemic began. That’s up from 37% in 2019.
In this 2022-23 academic year, the local NAMI chapter brought 28 volunteers to 39 schools in the Baltimore Metro area to present “Ending the Silence.”
The Delaware Emergency Management Agency’s School Safety and Wellness Suite offers anonymous reporting, crisis messaging, and mental health education.
Through the Return to Learn initiative, the district will enhance support for students facing challenges and high-risk situations.
For the first time on record, the firearm suicide rate for Black teens is higher than for white teens, according to preliminary data from the CDC.
Jeopardy! host and former champion Ken Jennings' new book is an offbeat and hilarious guide to the afterlife. He joins us to talk about '100 Places to See After You Die.'
Postpartum depression affects as many as 1 in 7 women in the U.S., though there are just two treatments approved for it.
You don't even have to own one. Research shows just 5 to 20 minutes interacting with other people's pooches can reduce stress hormones and increase well-being.
After Mairead McInerney was diagnosed with an aggressive form of breast cancer, ongoing drug shortages forced her treatment plan to be more grueling than she expected.
Dresser says the evidence suggests that heat can influence us in sometimes-indiscernible ways.
In 2022, Pennsylvania lawmakers promised to spend $100 million on adult mental health services. This year’s budget uses the money for a different purpose.
The center will divert people with mental illnesses away from incarceration and into treatment. It’s expected to open by the end of 2024.
In Philly, emergency response often arrives in the form of police officers. A new program seeks a more collaborative approach that addresses residents’ behavioral health needs
The five grantees aim to increase their organization’s workforce, improve accessibility of mental health services, and build new locations.
The 3-digit suicide prevention lifeline went live a year ago. More work is needed on the 988 system, but the first year has gone more smoothly than many expected.
Philadelphia leaders announced plans to build on 988 services and expand behavioral health crisis options throughout the city in the coming years.
There have been nearly a dozen mass shootings this month and a total 346 mass shootings so far this year — each one leaving a heavy toll for communities around them.
Historian Martha Hodes explores what happened to her own memories, and how she tried to get them back, after being held hostage on an airplane in 1970 in her new memoir.
Mobile crisis program supporters say additional funding will help to better staff professional teams and improve response times.
We dive into the mysterious part of the brain that holds our memories to explore what we remember and what we forget. We'll talk with a memory investigator.
Carlie Ostrom thought she had her life planned out until she suffered a traumatic brain injury and lost her sense of self.
$34 million would go toward workforce development and retention in the behavioral health field, including training, paid internships, loan repayment, and tuition assistance.
Chronic fatigue associated with long COVID forces many people to rest and disengage from activities they used to do — but limiting your life can feel powerless.
Julius Badour lost his job, quit his relationship, and left his hometown to live a life on the road. He learned some lessons about quitting along the way.
I grew up in the 1980s and ’90s with parents who strictly controlled my “screen time,” which almost exclusively meant TV back then, as well as a pocket game that died when I was 10 and was never replaced. Like many in my generation, I absorbed a general sense that video games, like TV, were frivolous brain rot.
Now, my two boys, ages 12 and 13, are growing up in a digital world in a way I did not. Their generation lives online, spending more hours in virtual spaces since the pandemic began.
I’m lucky: My sons are hardworking and kind to their chronically frazzled single mother. They make raising them as easy and joyful as adolescence could possibly allow.
But still, our house rules about video games are arbitrary and our disputes over them constant. No amount of yelling “No games on school nights!” or “Not before dinner!” has worked, or inspired them to learn a new skill instead.
I feel like I’m flying blind when it comes to regulating their game use and I know I’m not alone. Many parents worry that they should be doing more to limit online play.
But as I learned from talking to numerous experts — psychologists, game designers and researchers — the impact of video games is more nuanced than that of other kinds of screen time, like social media. In fact, some research shows it can have positive effects, like promoting problem solving, or teamwork and communication.
Here are these experts’ insights and advice for how to optimize the upsides of gaming and protect kids from potential hazards.
Video games are different from other screen time in crucial ways — and have some benefits“Screen time” is an outdated concept. Kids study, play video games, use social media and watch videos on screens, but those do not all have the same developmental impact. Video games, in fact, do not show the kind of negative behavioral or emotional effects researchers correlate with social media use, says Kelli Dunlap, a clinical psychologist and community director for Take This, a mental health advocacy group within the gaming community.
“Research has shown again and again and again, time spent playing video games is not predictive of mental health outcomes,” she says.
One reason for the difference in impact may be that social media is primarily about marketing, or comparing oneself to others, while gaming is generally about socializing with friends, solving a puzzle, or engaging in competition.
In fact, Dunlap says, parents often overlook some benefits of games: “They’re a tool. You can use games to improve your social connection, to practice feeling emotions we normally avoid, like guilt or grief or shame. A lot of games bring those feelings out in us, and they give us a space to play with those feelings.”
Games that involve joint projects like a battle or a quest can help develop useful social skills, says Peter Etchells, a research psychologist at Bath Spa University in the U.K. “It requires very kind of precise team-building,” he says. “It requires thinking about timings and placement and good communication skills to coordinate with people. It’s doing that kind of coordinated work that’s really useful for all sorts of things.”
Help kids prioritize offline activities so gaming doesn’t subsume themChildren need some limits on their gaming, especially if it begins to crowd out other essential or healthy activities, many experts warn, like schoolwork and sleep in particular.
“Screen time is a hard thing to quantify,” says Michael Rich, a pediatrician and director of the Center on Media and Child Health at Boston Children’s Hospital. “What is easier to quantify — and probably more in line with what is developmentally optimal — is quantifying non-screen time.”
He advises parents to watch that family meals, chores, and outdoor or in-person play do not get subsumed into game time.
Kids also benefit from having periods of lower stimulation, away from technology, Rich says. “I want to bring back boredom,” Rich argues, because that can also lead to imaginative play.
You need to start gaming with your kidsEvery expert I spoke with recommended playing video games with your child to figure out what might specifically be motivating them to play — the needs the game might fill for them.
Online chess, for example, is a different experience than a multiplayer game with friends. Shy children might find it easier to socialize in games. Another child might regard it as stress relief. Some children may use games as a place to escape or process a difficult situation.
Boston Children’s Rich says most things parents worry about with games — stranger danger, violence, sexuality — can be addressed by simply exploring the game through their eyes.
“What’s happening is that you are saying, ‘I love you, I respect you, I want to understand what is engaging you here,'” says Rich. “You’re entering that space with a very different stance, that of essentially the student. You will get a sense for what the game is.”
If you’ve noticed your kids yell, scream or cry about something that happened in a game, don’t be disturbed, experts say. A child’s reactions to emotions and interpersonal dynamics are real, even if the play itself takes place virtually, or on a device. Experts say outbursts during game play do not mean your child is more likely to act violently in real life.
Video games are like any other space where your kids spend time. Ask yourself: Is it safe? Who else is there?Games are social spaces — good or bad things can happen there — just as in real life. Think about the games your kids play as just another kind of space where you’re letting them hang out, several experts suggested.
For example: If you have a 5-year-old, you wouldn’t drop your child off alone at a mall, where strangers might approach. Now you might drop off your teen at the mall, but not before discussing who they’re hanging out with, what they plan to do, and perhaps an agreement about when to come home for dinner. The same general principles can apply to teens who game.
Parents should ask themselves: Does the game culture itself seem conducive to age-appropriate behavior? Games with female characters with exaggerated sexual features, for example, might subject a child to sexual harassment.
If you don’t like what you’re seeing in a game, remember that outright bans and restrictions tend to backfire with adolescents. It’s more vital to keep communication lines open, says Dunlap and other experts, so if something bad happens within the game, you can help them process or deal with it.
Watch for “dark designs” or designs that fuel nonstop playingBe on the watch for certain “dark patterns” or “dark designs” in games, say several gaming experts. These terms refer to software or algorithms written to elicit certain negative behaviors in their users.
One of the most common is in-game purchases that can border on extortion, says Max Birk, an industrial-design researcher at Eindhoven University of Technology in the Netherlands. “It’s important because it changes what the emphasis of the game designers is,” he says.
Games fueled by in-game purchases (as opposed to games you buy up front, like NBA2K or Dance Dance Revolution) tend to have a financial stake in keeping children engaged for long periods of time. These games make it very easy to start a new game, or create steep incentives to keep players coming back.
Birk suggests talking to your kids about the game structure and directing them toward games that are more about story lines, or that have natural ending points that can allow the kid to wind down game play on their own.
Monitor games for toxic culture and harassmentToxic culture and comments can thrive in certain games because parents are not monitoring those spaces. That often takes the form of harassment of female gamers. The onus is on parents of boys, especially, to make sure that they treat people equitably online, and to stand up against any sexist or misogynistic talk, says Jesse Fox, a communications professor at Ohio State University.
Remind your kids that rules about respectful behavior apply online as they do in life. “Gaming culture and gaming norms are going to imprint on their idea of normal behavior, what’s acceptable behavior,” Fox says. That’s why it is critical for parents to monitor that play space — listen to conversations, keep the screen within public view.
Find the spaces that are safer and more inclusive by design. Fortnite, Fox notes, is an example of a game that has a huge diversity of characters in game, because it’s trying to appeal to a very broad audience. That diversity makes it harder to distinguish players by race or gender.
Watch for these gaming red flagsFor many children, gaming can be positive, but it’s a good idea to keep an eye out for these signs of problematic game use.
Excessive spending in games: The game’s financial incentives might be to keep your child engaged and encourage — even try to coerce — their characters into spending money to advance. Teach your child to recognize these kinds of tactics and redirect them to games where the game itself is the primary focus.
Negative reactions or anxiety over gaming friends: If your kid is repeatedly having big emotional reactions to the game, check in and figure out what elements of the game are so upsetting. Then redirect them to games and spaces that don’t have these elements. Find single-player games to take a break from social dynamics.
Too little sleep: If your child is playing late into the night or turning up groggy in the morning, their game use might be out of hand. Make sure the child cannot access games all night long. Often, it’s not the desire to play the game itself, but the social pressure to not miss out on experiences with friends that will keep them online, U.K. researcher Peter Etchells says. So shut down other technology as well, preferably well before bedtime.
Copyright 2023 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.
Former first lady Rosalynn Carter has dementia and remains at home, her family has announced.
Carter, now 95, remains at home with former President Jimmy Carter, who has been at home receiving hospice care since early this year.
“She continues to live happily at home with her husband, enjoying spring in Plains and visits with loved ones,” the family said via The Carter Center, the global humanitarian organization the couple founded in 1982 after leaving the White House.
Married nearly 77 years, the Carters are the longest-married first couple in U.S. history.
The family noted in its statement that Rosalynn Carter spent her long public life advocating for individuals and families affected by mental illness and for those in caregiving relationships with loved ones.
“Mrs. Carter often noted that there are only four kinds of people in this world: those who have been caregivers; those who are currently caregivers, those who will be caregivers, and those who will need caregivers,” the statement reads. “The universality of caregiving is clear in our family, and we are experiencing the joy and the challenges of this journey. We do not expect to comment further and ask for understanding for our family and for everyone across the country serving in a caregiver role.”
The Carters have been visiting only with family and close friends in recent months, after the former president’s announcement that he would forgo further medical intervention after a series of short hospital stays.
Before Pennsylvania Sen. John Fetterman checked himself in to the hospital for clinical depression in February, he walked the halls of the Senate stone-faced and dressed in formal suits. These days, he’s back to wearing the hoodies and gym shorts he was known for before he became a senator.
Male senators are expected to wear a jacket and tie on the Senate floor, but Fetterman has a workaround. He votes from the doorway of the Democratic cloakroom or the side entrance, making sure his “yay” or “nay” is recorded before ducking back out. In between votes this past week, Fetterman’s hoodie stayed on for a news conference with four Democratic colleagues in suits, the 6-foot-8 Fetterman towering over his colleagues.
People close to Fetterman say his relaxed, comfortable style is a sign that the senator is making a robust recovery after six weeks of inpatient treatment at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center, where his clinical depression was treated with medication and he was fitted for hearing aids for hearing loss that had made it harder for him to communicate. His hospitalization came less than a year after he had a stroke during his Senate campaign that he has said nearly killed him, and from which he continues to recover.
“He’s setting a new dress code,” jokes Vermont Sen. Peter Welch, who is the only other newly elected Democrat in the Senate and spent a lot of time with Fetterman during their orientation at the beginning of the year. “He was struggling. And now he’s a joyful person to be around.”
Senators do occasionally vote in casual clothing — Republican Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas, for example, is known for sometimes arriving in gym clothes. But Fetterman’s regular attire is redefining fashion in the stuffy Senate. He’s turning heads on a daily basis as he walks the halls in his signature baggy Carhartt sweatshirts and saggy gym shorts, his hulking figure surrounded by much more formally dressed Washington types buzzing around the Capitol.
The senator’s staff had originally asked him to always wear suits, which he famously hates. But after a check with the Senate parliamentarian upon his return, it became clear that he could continue wearing the casual clothes that were often his uniform back at home in Pennsylvania, as long as he didn’t walk on to the Senate floor.
Welch said Fetterman was quiet and withdrawn when he first came to Washington, and often sat in the back of closed-door caucus meetings. Now he’s standing up and talking, sometimes joking and ribbing Pennsylvania’s senior senator, Democrat Bob Casey.
The Camden County Prosecutor’s Office, in conjunction with county agencies, hosted a mental health awareness walk on Saturday at Wiggins Waterfront Park in Camden in recognition of Mental Health Awareness Month.
“The pandemic, if anything, exacerbated people who either were predisposed to having a mental health issue or condition, and then it was compounded,” Camden County Prosecutor Grace MacAuly said.
MacAuly also said the purpose is to connect residents who may be going through a tough time with resources through a fun community event. She adds that over the last decade, she has seen that the prevalence of untreated mental health issues can lead to incarceration.
“We see people coming into the criminal justice system that really would never be in that situation in the first place, but for either an undiagnosed mental health issue or disorder, or one that’s diagnosed but maybe not properly treated,” MacAuly said.
This story is from The Pulse, a weekly health and science podcast.
Find it on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Science writer Ashley Yeager always loved to swim. She swam as a kid, and then competitively in college, and eventually started to do triathlons.
In 2011, she volunteered to participate in a study of triathletes, which involved taking some ultrasound pictures of her heart.
“I thought it was just so awesome that you could see this organ that keeps you alive,” Yeager said. “I was so focused on thinking about how the heart works … that it didn’t really dawn on me to be concerned that the tech went to go get a doctor.”
The doctor did an additional test, then recommended she see a cardiologist. That’s how, at age 26, Yeager found out she had a very serious heart condition called arrhythmogenic right ventricular cardiomyopathy. It’s a disease where a person’s scar tissue replaces their heart muscle tissue, which disrupts the electrical signal telling their heart to pump blood.
Yeager started taking medicine to keep the unusual heart rhythms at bay and had a defibrillator implanted in her chest. It’s connected to her heart, and if her heart gets into an abnormal rhythm, the device shocks her heart back to a normal rhythm.
For about five years, her life didn’t really change all that much. She was still doing what she loved: exercising.
She moved from North Carolina to New York City. And there, for the first time, the defibrillator shocked her heart.
“It is like an animal kicking you in the chest from the inside out. And it’s very painful and surprising,” Yeager said.
Attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder, ADHD, is a neurological condition that affects at least 4 percent of Americans – but there’s so much confusion about what it means and how it impacts everyday life. On social media, millions of people are trying to spread awareness and find connection by posting videos about their own experiences.
We increasingly have a better appreciation of neurodiversity and are learning that while ADHD can make it difficult to pay attention and manage tasks, it can also be a source of creativity and original thinking. Difference, it turns out, does not mean disability.
We talk with neuropsychologist David Nowell (@davidnowell) about diagnosing ADHD and helping people live with it. And, cartoonist Anika Orrock (@anikadrawls) on what she discovered in the 20 years since her diagnosis.
People experiencing homelessness in New Jersey will now have easier access to mental health services. On Monday, Governor Phil Murphy signed a law that allows mental health professionals to provide care at shelters.
It removes red tape that previously prohibited this.
“The stress individuals often face when experiencing homelessness can unfortunately lead to or exacerbate existing mental health challenges,” Murphy said in a statement. “This law reflects my administration’s belief that every New Jerseyan deserves access to the mental health care they need, and builds upon our work to expand these services throughout our state.”
Connie Mercer, CEO of the New Jersey Coalition to End Homelessness, said the law will make mental health services accessible to people who otherwise may not have the means to seek treatment on their own.
“If the program is in a shelter, they will have to be no cost. And not only no cost, but no barriers to getting in,” Mercer said.
Being a veterinarian is a dream job for many animal lovers — but the reality is often a far cry from giving clean bills of health to happy puppies and kittens. Many veterinarians report struggling with work-life balance and with the stark realities of their job — mainly having to euthanize very sick, beloved pets.
Data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) estimate that 1 in 6 veterinarians experience thoughts of suicide, putting them at higher risk for suicide than their peers. In 2018, the CDC also found that female veterinarians were 3.5 times as likely, and males were 2.1 times as likely to die by suicide than the general population.
A Philadelphia-based veterinary staffing agency IndeVets is hoping a new partnership with the mental health nonprofit Not One More Vet will provide a new option for veterinarians looking for help. Specifically, they plan to expand a peer support network for veterinarians dealing with emotional stress called “Lifeboat,” which originally started as a Facebook group.
As the Biden administration ends the COVID-19 public health emergency, millions of Americans who contracted the disease continue to suffer from symptoms associated with long COVID.
Neuropsychologist James C. Jackson says people with long COVID can suffer from symptoms like exhaustion, shortness of breath and disturbed sleep. Some of the most troubling symptoms are neurological: struggling to remember things, to focus, even to perform basic daily tasks and solve problems.
These symptoms can lead to a loss of employment, income and important relationships. Jackson, who is a research professor at Vanderbilt University, says that while long COVID was initially associated with people who became critically ill with COVID-19, he’s seeing an increasing number of patients for whom the initial illness was relatively mild.
“This is a little bit of a mystery,” Jackson says. “Many people with mild cases are profoundly debilitated [with long COVID], and some people with quite severe cases are doing fairly well.”
Jackson’s new book, Clearing the Fog, is a practical guide for long COVID patients and their families, giving advice on how to find help, and information on treatments and strategies for dealing with symptoms.
He notes while the scientific community rallied in response to COVID-19, there’s been less urgency in the response to long COVID, leaving patients and families on their own to find solutions.
“We were very successful at mobilizing our best scientists, our best experts to develop a vaccine in record time,” Jackson says. “That same commitment to doing something game changing has too often been absent in the context of long COVID… We’re making progress, but I think we’ve got a long way to go.”
Interview highlightsOn the number of people who have long COVIDThere’s a range of estimates that people report. In the book, I talk about the number 200 million [worldwide]. That’s a huge number of people, and that’s an estimate that is widely quoted. I think there’s some debate among experts about whether it’s more than that, about whether it’s less than that. I think the worldwide piece is important because this isn’t a United States problem, particularly. This is very much a global problem. And indeed, some of the resources that could be used effectively to treat long COVID, those are even less available in some developing countries than in the United States.
On the type of cognitive impairment associated with long COVID So the thing that people talk about the most is they talk about “memory problems.” … So often they have memory problems, but more typically the problems are with processing speed. That has to do with how quickly you can process information and with attention and with this thorny thing that we call executive functioning. And I say “thorny thing” because executive functioning is associated with ability to function in so many areas.
People with executive dysfunction … they have problems driving. They can’t manage their money. They have a hard time managing their medication. They can’t plan for the future. So executive dysfunction, processing, speed, inattention and some deficits with memory. And if you put it together — because often people have all of that — it’s a really toxic cocktail. And what it means for people is they have a hard time functioning in the workplace. They often aren’t functioning well socially. They’re not reading social cues, they’re disinhibited.
On the mental health issues that often accompany long COVID There’s no question that mental health issues are tremendously important in the context of long COVID, and why wouldn’t they be? If you’ve lost your job, you’re socially isolated, you’ve lost a lot of hope. In that context, it’s really normal, I think, to feel depression, to feel anxiety, to develop PTSD in some cases, because it’s hugely traumatic. … In some cases, for people to have worsening OCD, increased suicide and suicidal ideation is another thing we’re concerned about. It’s a topic we engage in our support groups all of the time.
Many people are really, really reluctant to have a conversation with their provider about a mental health issue because for some of them they worry, I think, that that provider will say, “See, I told you so. It’s only depression. It’s only anxiety.” … Patients worry that if they say, “I’m a little anxious,” people will say, “It’s all in your head.” And the reality is both can exist, right? You can have physical problems, they can be completely real, and along with that, you can have debilitating mental health problems. And that’s what we see probably in a third of cases.
On why it’s important to redefine “brain injury” in the context of long COVID Unfortunately, physicians — thoughtful and well-meaning, excellent clinically, etc. — they have a certain notion about what constitutes a brain injury: A brain injury is a stroke; a brain injury is you fall off a ladder and you crack your skull on the driveway. That’s too often what is defined as a brain injury – and of course, it is.
The problem is there are a lot of other ways to get brain injuries. You can be in the ICU on a ventilator. You can have not enough oxygen get to your brain, something called hypoxia, that can be a brain injury. You can be delirious, which is deleterious to your brain, that can cause a brain injury. And you can have long COVID. That, too, can basically be a cause of a brain injury.
So we need to change the paradigm a little bit so that people start appreciating, “Gosh, you can have this medical pathway to a brain injury and we need to refer you to cognitive rehabilitation.” It’s not only that you’re in Iraq and you survive an IED explosion. It’s not only that you’re on the football field and have a concussion. There’s a medical route to a brain injury, but no one, almost no one gets referred for rehab. We have to change that.
On how social isolation may worsen long COVID[People with long COVID] feel like other people don’t really understand them and they feel like the overtures they have made to try to connect with people … are often met with negative sorts of things. That is, they engage with people, they’re wearing masks. People look at them with a side eye. They feel embarrassed. Often people don’t get how impaired they actually are because they don’t look impaired. So often they’ve tried to connect socially, that has not gone necessarily very well. They often recede into this hermit-like existence. Often their fatigue is very confining. Couple that with fears about getting COVID again, their world gets smaller and smaller and smaller.
And the problem with that, I think, as a point of fact, we know that the more social support people have, the better they do; the less social support they have, the less well they do. As people recede into that house or that apartment, sometimes that room, they lose those social connections, and, not surprisingly, they get more and more depressed.
On how to ask for help with long COVID, especially if you lose your job or can’t work Social Security, short-term disability, long-term disability, for some people, there are a range of options that are available, but people need to be aware first of what is available. They need to think of how to ask for it. … If you’re cognitively impaired, you’re obviously less good at filling out complicated forms. You’re less good at advocating for yourself.
That’s where family members come in. That’s where friends come in. Asking for help is one of the things we work on in our support groups … the right and wrong ways to ask for help. The research says that if you ask someone for help, whether it’s to take you to the store, whether it’s help in filling out a form, if you ask them directly, they’ll almost always help. If you send them an email, they often won’t. So learning to ask for help, it’s an important skill and it’s one that people with long COVID unfortunately need to learn.
Sam Briger and Seth Kelley produced and edited this interview for broadcast. Bridget Bentz, Molly Seavy-Nesper and Carmel Wroth adapted it for the web.
Copyright 2023 Fresh Air. To see more, visit Fresh Air.
When cops in New Jersey are paired with mental health specialists, people in mental distress are far less likely to be arrested and are instead referred to health care services, a recent report found.
According to a Brookings Institution analysis of New Jersey’s ARRIVE Together program, people in mental distress are also less likely to become victims of force.
The report, which analyzed 342 calls for service between December 2021 and January 2023, found that the ARRIVE Together program did not lead to significant differences in outcomes based on race.
“We did not find racial differences in the likelihood of being arrested or use of force,” said Rashawn Ray, the report’s author and a senior fellow of governance studies for Brookings.
Officials first launched ARRIVE in 2021, servicing Cumberland County. Last year, the program expanded to the cities of Elizabeth and Linden, in Union County.
In January, Temple University announced it was committing $1 million annually toward health and wellness initiatives for students and staff. The long-term plan called for hiring and retaining more counselors, creating a new Health and Well-Being Division, and establishing a satellite center at the school’s Health Sciences Center.
The initiative was needed: New figures released by the school show that the need for these kinds of services is considerable, and growing. The number of students seeking mental health services had jumped from one to three per day, pre-pandemic, to three to seven per day.
In the 2021-22 academic year, up to 3,402 students enrolled in mental-health counseling services, with 687 citing that they were “in a crisis.” The latter figure was a 281% increase over the prior year, and this year’s numbers are similarly alarming.
“We are at 650 this year to date. That puts us on track to meet or exceed last year’s total,” said Mark Denys, the university’s associate vice provost for health and well-being.
Most students are self-identifying their situation as “a crisis,” which can make clinical evaluation of their condition challenging, Denys said.
Obviously, “if the student is suicidal or homicidal — a danger to themselves or others — they may get referred over to one of the crisis centers in the city,” he said.
Still, “if a student feels as though whatever’s going on with them can’t wait until tomorrow” — or a couple more hours — “we’re going to treat them as a crisis. From there, the evaluation can go in a number of different directions,” he said.
Most appointments “lean heavy” on first-year students, Denys said, (including some who did virtual learning the first year of the pandemic). He also noted that there isn’t a direct correlation of rising crisis visits with more students on campus, as the increasing volume of visits has been steady since the pre-pandemic year.
“We made such a very quick, almost seamless, pivot to virtual counseling during the pandemic” — when students couldn’t come to campus — “that our numbers didn’t go down at all,” said Denys.
Tony Walker, senior vice president of academic programs at the nonprofit JED foundation, which advocates for teen mental health and suicide prevention, said that the impact of the pandemic on young people has been profound.
“The pandemic exacerbated feelings of depression, anxiety, and suicidal ideation, especially amongst BIPOC and LGBTQ communities,” he said.
But it’s not the only thing that weighs heavily on the younger generation, who are “especially sensitive to social and racial injustices.”
The Clifton family has been farming in Milton, Delaware since the 1920s, passing down their livelihood from generation to generation. Today, the fourth generation of the family runs Clifton Farms, Inc., growing vegetables on their Sussex County farm near Rt. 1.
In Delaware, some farms “may even go back to the 1600s,” according to William Donald Clifton, the third-generation farmer of Clifton Farms. The 65-year-old says his life has been centered on farming for the past 45 years.
It’s a rewarding lifestyle, Clifton said, but it comes with plenty of stress.
“It’s a great livelihood within which to raise a family,” he said. But “it is also challenging. In a 10-year cycle, we may have two excellent years, two terrible years, and the rest of them are somewhere in between.”
11 acres of the almost 1000 acres are planted with sweet peas, often known as English peas. (Johnny Perez-Gonzalez/WHYY)Usually, success is determined by circumstances beyond their control like the weather. Some of those terrible years are due to a lack of rain, others because of too much heat.
“Corn can be stunted, most crops can be stunted by very high temperatures,” he said, noting that high temperatures contribute to drought conditions. “All crops suffer from lack of water, even with irrigation … Those are the types of struggles we have year in, year out.”
There is an epidemic of loneliness in the United States and lacking connection can increase the risk for premature death to levels comparable to smoking 15 cigarettes a day, according to a new advisory from the U.S. Surgeon General.
The report released on Tuesday, titled “Our Epidemic of Loneliness and Isolation,” finds that even before the COVID-19 pandemic, about half of U.S. adults reported experiencing measurable levels of loneliness.
And it warns that the physical consequences of poor connection can be devastating, including a 29% increased risk of heart disease; a 32% increased risk of stroke; and a 50% increased risk of developing dementia for older adults.
“It’s hard to put a price tag, if you will, on the amount of human suffering that people are experiencing right now,” Surgeon General Dr. Vivek Murthy told All Things Considered.
“In the last few decades, we’ve just lived through a dramatic pace of change. We move more, we change jobs more often, we are living with technology that has profoundly changed how we interact with each other and how we talk to each other.”
“And you can feel lonely even if you have a lot of people around you, because loneliness is about the quality of your connections.”
Across age groups, people are spending less time with each other in person than two decades ago. The advisory reported that this was most pronounced in young people aged 15-24 who had 70% less social interaction with their friends.
Murthy said that many young people now use social media as a replacement for in-person relationships, and this often meant lower-quality connections.
“We also know that for some kids, being online has been a way to find community at a time when many of them have not been able to,” he said. “What we need to protect against, though, are the elements of technology, and social media in particular, that seek to maximize the amount of time that our children are spending online at the expense of their in-person interactions.”
Advisories are reserved for issues deemed significant public health challenges that “need the American people’s immediate attention,” according to a statement from Murthy, who has spoken openly of his own experiences with loneliness in the past.
In response, the advisory outlines the framework for a new national strategy. It is based on six foundational pillars, which are:
- Strengthening social infrastructure, which includes things like parks and libraries as well as public programs.
- Enacting pro-connection public policies at every level of government, including things like accessible public transportation or paid family leave.
- Mobilizing the health sector to address the medical needs that stem from loneliness.
- Reforming digital environments to “critically evaluate our relationship with technology.”
- Deepening our knowledge through more robust research into the issue.
- Cultivating a culture of connection.
Murthy said loneliness isn’t a uniquely American problem, but instead a feature of modern life around the globe. Yet he noted that in the U.S. participation in community organizations — from faith groups to recreational leagues — has declined in recent decades.
“So we’re seeing more forces that take us away from one another and fewer of the forces that used to bring us together,” he said.
The advisory comes on the back of numerous studies in recent years that warn of the mental and physical dangers of loneliness.
A 2022 paper from Johns Hopkins University also found socially isolated older adults had a higher chance of developing dementia than their peers.
“Social connections matter for our cognitive health, and the risk of social isolation is potentially modifiable for older adults,” Thomas Cudjoe, an assistant professor of medicine at Johns Hopkins and a senior author of the study, said in a statement.
Murthy said loneliness can impact people in a variety of ways, so understanding the signs is the first step to addressing it.
“Some people react to loneliness by withdrawing and getting quiet. Others react to loneliness by becoming irritable and angry, and they may lash out more,” he said. “That’s why sometimes it takes a little time to really reflect on what’s happening in our life. And sometimes we need somebody else to tell us, ‘Hey, you’ve been withdrawing more’ to help us understand that we might actually be dealing with loneliness.”
Copyright 2023 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.
If you or someone you know is in crisis, call or text the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 988. The hotline is staffed 24/7 by trained counselors who can offer free, confidential support. Spanish speakers can call 1-888-628-9454. People who are deaf or hard of hearing can call 1-800-799-4889.
The parents of a Lawrenceville School student appeared in s nationally-televised interview Tuesday, one year after their son committed suicide. Bill and Dr. Elizabeth Reid appeared on ABC’s Good Morning America after the school admitted it failed to protect 17-year-old Jack Reid from bullying.
The admission from the elite boarding school in Mercer County comes on the anniversary of Jack Reid’s death.
As part of a settlement with the Reids, the school said in a statement on its website it “examined [its] role and take responsibility for what [it] could have done differently.”
“When these behaviors were brought to the attention of the School, there were steps that the School should in hindsight have taken but did not,” the statement said.
Reid’s parents said the admission from the school was very courageous and hope that other institutions follow.
“We’re very gratified by the admission of the school that there are things that they could have done and should have done, including the intervention of adults in certain circumstances,” said Bill Reid, his father.
False seeds plantedJack Reid was bullied over the course of a year starting in the Spring of 2021 based on rumors that had spread across campus that the school later found to be untrue. He was accused of committing sexual assault by kissing a girl. Later that year, an anonymous post on a nationwide student app said he was a rapist.
The school never shared publicly or privately that the rumors about Jack Reid were false.
“When these behaviors were brought to the attention of the School, there were steps that the School should in hindsight have taken but did not,” the statement said. “There also were circumstances in which the involvement of an adult would have made a difference.”
Growing up as a “strong-willed” Latina in the United States has been a bittersweet journey for Isana Ventura of 32, who migrated with her family to Sussex County, Delaware, when she was three months old. Her family came to southern Delaware to escape a decades-long civil war in Guatemala. Despite the family’s traumatic arrival, Ventura says it wasn’t always considered acceptable to talk about her mental health needs.
“As Latinos, we’ve been raised to be strong-willed,” she said. “From different conversations that I’ve had with different people, [talking about mental health] is seen as you being weak or maybe not having a strong faith. That’s where seeking mental health therapy and different things like that is kind of frowned upon.”
It’s been a similar struggle for 25-year-old Guatemalan-American Jason Perez who lives in Georgetown in Sussex County. Even though his mother encouraged him to seek therapy at an early age, it felt strange to him.
“I went to therapy as a chore,” Perez said. “I would tell my therapist I’m fine, I’m okay because I didn’t want to be seen as crazy.”
The idea that “it’s okay to not be okay” was something Perez had to discover on his own. Unlike Ventura, Perez also had to cope with the idea that talking about mental health wasn’t “machismo” – another common stigma in Latino culture.
“Not only the Latino community, but other cultures, the man is supposed to be manly, he’s supposed to hide his emotions,” he said. “Even in my family, I’ve been told ‘you’re a man, you’re not supposed to cry or show your emotions’ and I guess that runs from one generation to the other.”
Both Ventura and Perez are working to overcome these generational hurdles, but there are other barriers preventing many others from doing so.
“The Latino culture is very similar to other cultures where there are additional layers of stigma because of some of those cultural beliefs,” said Joshua Thomas, CEO of the Delaware chapter for the National Alliance on Mental Illness. “That can be from the culture saying, ‘we don’t talk about this issue, we don’t talk about mental health,’ or a belief that maybe other things are responsible for people’s behavior.”
That cultural stigma is made worse in southern Delaware, where there’s a large Latino population but fewer mental health care providers and other resources in Kent and Sussex counties.
“The most significant trend or issue that we’re facing right now is access to care and a shortage of mental health providers,” said Stephanie Traynor, deputy director of Division of Prevention and Behavioral Health Services. “The number of providers in New Castle County is higher than Kent and Sussex.”
Part of that reason, according to Traynor, is because New Castle has two large hospitals, Christiana and Nemours, that employ licensed mental health providers, particularly psychologists.
“One of the things that we’ve done to try to increase access is to bring in new providers into our network,” she said. “We brought in eight new providers and then an additional five providers added new services, and we specifically added two providers who are serving Kent and Sussex and they’re providing substance use services.”
Leaders not only are focused on bringing more providers and agencies, but also being receptive to hiring professionals with diverse backgrounds.
“The stigma associated with mental health conditions can have even more barriers and even stronger stigma when there are certain cultural issues that can come into play,” said NAMI CEO Thomas.
New Jersey lawmakers have two months to pass the state budget for the fiscal year 2024, which begins on July 1.
Organizations providing adult disability, mental health, and substance abuse programs hope to see an annual boost in state funding to offset the impacts of recent inflation.
Lawmakers are considering legislation establishing a yearly cost-of-living rate adjustment for programs providing mental health, substance use treatment, or services to persons with developmental disabilities. The adjustment is based on Consumer Price Index, or CPI, which helps measure inflation.
“Because of lack of investment over time, we have a waitlist of over 500 people stemming from various things,” Matthew Binder, Easterseals New Jersey advocacy manager, said. “Lack of funding, inability to pay frontline staff what they’re worth, and high turnover.”
As the cost of living continues to climb, nonprofits like Easterseals said they’re having difficulty hiring and retaining staff.
Most of Easterseals’ programs, including case management, residential services, and other support services, are paid for using Medicaid.
“About 81% of our funding comes from some government source, very little charity. That is just how the adult system of care works industry-wide,” Binder said. “Especially post-COVID… inflation and wage compression around the workforce have really rocked this community to its core.”
Comedian Richard Lewis is retiring from stand-up following four surgeries and a diagnosis of Parkinson’s disease.
The 75-year-old “Curb Your Enthusiasm” star, who is known for wearing all-black and exploring his neuroses onstage, posted a video Monday to Twitter explaining his various health issues.
“For the last three-and-a-half years, I’ve had sort of a rocky time,” he said, adding that he has suffered with back pain, and he had shoulder and hip replacement surgeries.
He also got a brain scan because he was shuffling his feet when he walked. Doctors diagnosed him with Parkinson’s. “Luckily, I got it late in life, and they say you progress very slowly if at all, and I’m on the right meds, so I’m cool,” he said. ”I’m finished with stand-up. I’m just focusing on writing and acting.”
Lewis’ big screen credits include “Robin Hood: Men in Tights,” “Leaving Las Vegas” and “Vamps” and TV appearances on everything from “7th Heaven” to “George Lopez” and “BoJack Horseman” to “Dr. Katz, Professional Therapist.”
Sen. John Fetterman acknowledges there was a time not that long ago, when he didn’t want to talk about depression — at all. Now, the Pennsylvania Democrat, who returned to the U.S. Senate this week after taking leave in mid-February to seek treatment for clinical depression, says it’s his responsibility to “pay it forward” with candor about the disease.
“I thought every night when I was laying in bed when I was in the hospital — like what if I just would have done something about this before, and I could kick myself and I just think about how my family wouldn’t [have been] put through it and my constituents,” he told NPR’s Scott Detrow in his first broadcast interview since his return to Congress.
“But now that I am back, I’m really committed to … letting people know: to anyone that has any of these feelings, there’s a path, and you can get better.”
Fetterman’s colleagues cheered his return, giving him a standing ovation during the Democratic caucus meeting this week.
“I can’t tell you how moving it was to me,” Fetterman said. “I would have been blown away if it was just warm, but a standing ovation and hugs and big shakes and everything — and it was just — I’m so grateful to our colleagues and to Leader [Chuck] Schumer.”
He added that some Senate colleagues visited him while he was receiving treatment at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center: Democratic Sens. Tina Smith of Minnesota and Bob Casey of Pennsylvania, as well as Republican Sen. Katie Britt of Alabama.
Sen. John Fetterman and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer give a thumbs up to reporters as they walk to the weekly Senate policy luncheons together at the U.S. Capitol Building on April 18. (Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images)Fetterman sat down with Detrow in his Capitol Hill office, a windowless space that his team has decorated with posters of Philadelphia sports mascots Gritty and the Phanatic. The freshman senator — who recently learned that he can vote without wearing a suit — was wearing his signature Carhartt hoodie and grey gym shorts. He was also sporting brand-new hearing aids and using closed captioning to help process speech.
Ever since he suffered a severe stroke during his Senate campaign last year, Fetterman has had to answer questions about his health. Still, the former Lt. Gov of Pennsylvania defeated Trump-endorsed celebrity doctor Mehmet Oz in November for the first open Senate seat in the state in a dozen years. His victory was a triumph for Democrats and helped cement their control of the Senate.
But Fetterman says there wasn’t a moment of relief, even after coming out triumphant in the wake of an extremely competitive and toxic campaign.
“After I won, I still felt that depression — like, I felt lost,” he said. “I wasn’t elated. I wasn’t happy about it. I was relieved that it was over. But at the same time, I never had the opportunity to recover from the stroke, and I had depression, and a lot of just the stress and everything. [I] really wasn’t able to address it.”
He said the pressures of political campaigning and the seemingly endless attack ads, coupled with the stroke, all led to a “perfect storm.”
On addressing his illness with his familyFetterman didn’t shy away from talking about the pain his depression caused himself and his family. For instance, the day he checked himself into the hospital was his eldest son’s 14th birthday.
“I always get emotional just thinking about it,” he said. “I think back [to] when I was 14 years old, what if this would have been what happened to me?”
Fetterman said he fears his son will always associate his birthday with the day his father checked himself into the hospital.
Sen. John Fetterman (D-Pa.) sits for an interview with NPR. It was the first day he wore a new hearing aid, after being diagnosed with hearing loss and audio processing issues following his stroke. (Keren Carrión/NPR)“My oldest son had a conversation where he was having a hard time understanding — ‘why, Dad, why are you depressed? Like, you know you ran and you won.’ And I tried to explain to him, like, geez, you know, Karl — I had this stroke and all of these ads and everything, and he’s like, ‘but aren’t we enough?” he remembered through tears. “Aren’t we enough?'”
Fetterman said the six weeks in treatment was “about me redeeming, trying to redeem myself in their eyes.”
And he said that he’s grateful for so much now that his depression is in remission.
“Being a partner in a full [way], and being present, just taking my kids out to go and get pizza [are] simple things I’ve just cherished.”
Copyright 2023 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.
This story originally appeared on 6abc.
Sen. John Fetterman, who checked himself into Walter Reed National Military Medical Center earlier this year for treatment for clinical depression, plans to return to Capitol Hill today.
The 53-year-old Democrat was treated for six weeks and has previously said that healthcare “changed his life.”
Along with the mental health issues, Fetterman has struggled with an auditory processing disorder, a lingering effect of a stroke he suffered last May.
Fetterman now uses devices that transcribe spoken words in real-time.
Amid an increase in autism prevalence, The Precisionists, Inc. — a national workforce development program that employs people with autism and other brain differences — is expanding to Philadelphia with hopes of creating more than 500 jobs in the coming years.
Launched in 2016, the company partners with corporations and other private entities to provide neurodivergent people with sustainable full-time work. The goal of the program is to put participants in a position to live independently, a milestone many people in this community struggle to reach.
Two-thirds of young adults with autism are unemployed, according to the A.J. Drexel Autism Institute.
“For so many years, people have focused on the challenges and shortcomings around autism and neurodiversity. But it’s about figuring out the person’s strengths, not focusing on the challenges. Because when you figure out their strengths, and then line up projects that give them a chance to utilize those strengths…then they are incredibly high performers,” said TPI’s CEO Ernest Dianastasis.
In Philadelphia, The Precisionists, Inc. will continue its partnership with PECO Energy. The company will also work with Comcast, Independence Blue Cross, DuPont, Drexel University, and Vertex — to start.
Employees will be paid as consultants and most of the work will be related to IT or business services, said Dianastasis. For example, in other markets, employees have helped digitize and index human resources files for Independence Blue Cross.
Pennsylvania Sen. John Fetterman has left Walter Reed National Military Medical Center after six weeks of inpatient treatment for clinical depression, with plans to return to the Senate when the chamber resumes session in mid-April, his office said Friday.
In a statement, Fetterman’s office said he is back home in Braddock, in western Pennsylvania, with his depression “in remission” and gave details on his treatment including that his depression was treated with medication and that he is wearing hearing aids for hearing loss.
Fetterman, who has a wife and three school-age children, said he is happy to be home.
“I’m excited to be the father and husband I want to be, and the senator Pennsylvania deserves. Pennsylvanians have always had my back, and I will always have theirs,” said Fetterman said. “I am extremely grateful to the incredible team at Walter Reed. The care they provided changed my life.”
Fetterman will return to the Senate the week of April 17.
Fetterman checked into Walter Reed after weeks of what aides described as Fetterman being withdrawn and uninterested in eating, discussing work or the usual banter with staff.
Fetterman, 53, was barely a month into his service in Washington and still recovering from the aftereffects of the stroke he suffered last May during his campaign when he went to Walter Reed on the advice of the Capitol physician, Dr. Brian P. Monahan.
Post-stroke depression is common and treatable through medical and talk therapy, doctors say.
Fetterman’s return will be welcome news for Democrats who have struggled to find votes for some nominations, in particular, without Fetterman there.
Fetterman’s office also released details of his treatment under medical professionals led by Dr. David Williamson, a neuropsychiatrist.
When he was admitted, Fetterman had “severe symptoms of depression with low energy and motivation, minimal speech, poor sleep, slowed thinking, slowed movement, feelings of guilt and worthlessness, but no suicidal ideation,” the statement attributed to Williamson said.
Top Bucks County officials are suing social media companies for contributing to the teen mental health crisis. They are following other municipalities trying to hold the tech giants accountable for teen depression, anxiety and rising suicide rates. We’ll talk with Bucks County Commissioner Chair Bob Harvie about the lawsuit and Harvard researcher Carrie James about teen digital life.
And, it’s baseball season—time to talk about the Phillies with broadcaster Tom McCarthy,who fills us in on how somebig rule changes will affect the game.
Plus, NPR’s Sylvia Poggioli is starting a new chapter in her life. We’ll ask her about her four decades as a European correspondent before she steps away from the role.
Pennsylvania Sen. John Fetterman will return to the Senate in April, two months after the freshman Democrat sought inpatient treatment for clinical depression, a person close to Fetterman said Wednesday.
The person, who was not authorized to discuss Fetterman’s plans and spoke on condition of anonymity, said Fetterman will return the week of April 17.
It was not immediately clear when Fetterman will leave Walter Reed National Military Medical Center, where he checked in Feb. 15 after weeks of what aides described as Fetterman being withdrawn and uninterested in eating, discussing work, or the usual banter with staff.
Fetterman, 53, was barely a month into his service in Washington and still recovering from the aftereffects of the stroke he suffered last May during his campaign when he went to Walter Reed on the advice of the Capitol physician, Dr. Brian P. Monahan.
Post-stroke depression is common and treatable, doctors say.
Pennsylvania Sen. John Fetterman’s office said Thursday that he is expected to return soon to the chamber, although Democratic leaders are giving no timeline five weeks after he sought inpatient treatment for clinical depression.
Fetterman, 53, was weeks into his service in Washington and still recovering from the aftereffects of the stroke he had last May during his campaign when he checked himself into Walter Reed National Military Medical Center on Feb. 15.
Aides said at the time that Fetterman had not been his usual self for weeks. He was withdrawn, showing a disinterest in talking, eating and the usual banter with aides. Post-stroke depression is common and treatable, doctors say.
Who can argue with the sentiment that “life is hard?” Most of us have some experience with loss, disappointment and failure. Philosopher Kieran Setiya has thought about the adversity that life throws our way — he’s had to come to terms with chronic pain that’s hounded him for much of his adult life.
In his new book, Life Is Hard: How Philosophy Can Help Us Find Our Way, Setiya, shares wisdom for coping with sorrow, loneliness, injustice and pain, gathered from great thinkers like Plato, Shakespeare, Kant, Woolf, Didion and more, and advises us not to embrace excessive positivity.
A large group of sheriff’s deputies and employees of a Virginia mental hospital pinned patient Irvo Otieno to the ground until he was motionless and limp, then began unsuccessful resuscitation efforts, newly obtained surveillance video shows.
The footage, which has no audio, shows various members of the group struggling with a handcuffed and shackled Otieno over the course of about 20 minutes after he’s led into a room at Central State Hospital, where he was going to be admitted March 6. For most of that duration, Otieno is on the floor being restrained by a fluctuating group that at one point appeared to reach 10 people pressing down on various parts of his body.
The death of the 28-year-old Black man has led to second-degree murder charges against seven deputies and three hospital workers and an outcry from his family, who has said he was brutally mistreated, both at the state hospital and while in law enforcement custody for several days earlier. Attorneys for many of the defendants have said they will vigorously fight the charges.
Relatives of Otieno were shown video from the hospital last week by a prosecutor, Dinwiddie Commonwealth’s Attorney Ann Cabell Baskervill, who had said that she planned to publicly release it Tuesday.
But attorneys for at least two of the defendants sought to block the video’s release, arguing that it could hinder a fair trial. The Associated Press and other news outlets obtained it and other footage through a link included in a public court filing made by Baskervill.
According to timestamps included in the footage, an SUV carrying Otieno arrived at the hospital just before 4 p.m. March 6. By 4:19 p.m., a different camera shows him being brought into a room with tables and chairs. He is hauled toward a seat before eventually slumping to the floor.
An increasing number of workers put their hands on him, holding him down as he appears to start to move on the floor. Otieno’s body is difficult to see at times, obscured by someone on top of him or someone standing.
“He certainly did not deserve to be smothered to death, which is what happened,” Baskervill said in court Tuesday. The workers were holding him down, “from his braids down to his toes,” she said.
By the 4:39 p.m. timestamp, someone is taking his pulse and he appears unresponsive. Soon after, as Otieno’s body lies still, someone appears to administer two injections. By 4:42 p.m., CPR appears to be underway. Life-saving efforts continue for over a half-hour until the workers step back from Otieno’s body, which is draped with a sheet.
Final autopsy findings have not yet been released, though Baskervill has said multiple times that he died of asphyxiation. Defense attorneys have raised the possibility that the injections contributed to his death, though she disputed that Tuesday, saying he was already dead when the shots were administered.
Fictional soccer coach Ted Lasso used a White House visit Monday to encourage people, even in politically divided Washington, to make it a point to check in often with friends, family and co-workers to “ask how they’re doing, and listen, sincerely,”
Comedian Jason Sudeikis, who plays the title character — an American coaching a soccer team in London — and other cast members were meeting with President Joe Biden and first lady Jill Biden to talk about how mental health contributes to overall well-being.
Mental health and looking after one another is a theme of “Ted Lasso,” Sudeikis told reporters from the lectern as he helped press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre open her daily White House briefing. The Emmy-winning, feel-good show on Apple TV+ just opened its third season.
“While it’s easier said than done, we also have to know that we shouldn’t be afraid to ask for help ourselves,” Sudeikis said. “That does take a lot, especially when it’s something that has such a negative stigma to it, such as mental health and it doesn’t need to be that way.
“And if you can ask for that help from a professional, fantastic,” he continued. “If it needs to be a loved one, equally as good, in a lot of ways.”
This story originally appeared on Spotlight PA.
A decades-old Pennsylvania law is supposed to protect people with mental health issues from prosecution if they cannot understand the legal system and cannot aid in their own defense, but a recent investigation found that instead, that very system often traps them in jail.
The six-month investigation, published by Spotlight PA and the Pittsburgh Institute for Nonprofit Journalism, found the state’s “competency” review system is so broken it often extends incarceration, which can exacerbate mental health issues.
There is no one state agency overseeing the competency system and no standardized way for documenting competency assessments and hearings, making it difficult to identify people who may be languishing in jail. In the absence of a statewide solution, some local government officials and agencies have come up with their own ways to address the problems:
PoliceAs part of their investigation, Spotlight PA and PINJ conducted an analysis of nearly 700 cases involving competency issues — cases likely to involve someone with serious mental health needs. The review found the cases most often involved non-violent misdemeanors or summary offenses, Pennsylvania’s most minor charges.
Experts echoed this finding and said it creates a cycle of incarceration. Those with mental illness often face arrest for low-level crimes, may deteriorate while incarcerated, and upon release are at greater risk of another arrest.
Fixing the system, they said, includes preventing that cycle before it begins. In Lancaster, some police departments are trying to do just that.
“The problem is that officers only had two tools, handcuffs and ambulances,” said Elizabethtown Police Chief Ed Cunningham. “If we couldn’t force you to go in an ambulance, then the only way we could get you to somebody who would help you with handcuffs.”
Previously, officers responding to a person in crisis might have engaged in “mercy booking,” Cunningham said, to try to get someone clearly suffering from a mental health or addiction issue in front of a judge who can order treatment.
Now, in his jurisdiction, the district attorney, local judges, and the department have given officers the authority to throw away low level charges.
Instead of arresting people in crisis, Cunningham said, officers connect the person with an on-call civilian crisis responder who will help figure out what they need — whether that’s to get home so they can take their medicine, or to check into a long-term treatment facility.
But the Elizabethtown programs survive on a hodgepodge of support from Lancaster County, state and federal grants, and partnerships with local businesses including the local addiction recovery provider Blueprints.
“We’re always looking for partners, ways to pay for this to make it self-sustaining,” Cunningham said.
Calls for a non-police response to mental health crises have amplified following the release of police body camera footage depicting the killing of Najee Seabrooks.
“Individuals and families of individuals who call 911 for help in their most vulnerable hour should receive support, not violence.” Black Lives Matter Paterson said in a statement Friday morning.
The 31-year old Paterson violence intervention advocate was experiencing a mental health emergency, when police arrived at his Mill Street apartment on March 3. Seabrooks made the call to police himself, according to 911 recordings, apparently afraid that he was in danger.
Authorities released body camera footage depicting the shooting that killed Paterson, New Jersey violence intervention advocate Najee Seabrooks.
The New Jersey Attorney General’s Office released the footage Thursday afternoon, along with seven 911 calls from the more than five-hour interaction between Seabrooks and Paterson Police.
Phone calls show Seabrooks, who was experiencing a mental health episode, called police himself apparently afraid that he was in danger.
“I’ve received death threats,” Seabrooks told dispatchers. “I need help being escorted to my car.”
Family and friends of Paterson, New Jersey anti-violence advocate Najee Seabrooks are demanding that police release bodycam footage of Seabrooks’ killing to his family.
Paterson Police fatally shot Seabrooks on March 3 after a four-hour altercation at a residence on Mill Street, authorities said.
Protests amplified over the weekend as demonstrators called for full transparency and accountability.
Protesters rally outside the Paterson Police Department on March 10. (Tennyson Donyéa/WHYY)Dozens gathered outside the Frank X. Graves, Jr. Public Safety Complex and a business associated with an officer involved in the incident.
“Jail the killer cops,” the crowd implored on Friday.
Seabrooks was mentally distressed when Paterson Police were dispatched, according to the New Jersey Attorney General’s Office.
Protesters shout at police outside the Paterson Police Department. (Tennyson Donyéa/WHYY)Police shot and killed Seabrooks after he locked himself in a bathroom. Last week the attorney general said officers Anzore Tsay and Jose Hernandez shot Seabrooks after officers Hector Mendez, Qiad Lin, and Mario Vdovjak deployed non-lethal force.
Seabrooks was a member of a violence intervention group called Paterson Healing Collective, the first hospital-based violence intervention program in Passaic County, according to its website. The Collective is trained in crisis intervention and advocates said the group should have been allowed to help de-escalate the situation.
Protesters rally outside the Paterson Police Department on March 10. (Tennyson Donyéa/WHYY)“They didn’t have to shoot him,” said Gladys Reed, a family friend. “You need to hear somebody’s voice that they know, and they can calm them down, so it won’t have to get to this situation.”
A spokesman for Pennsylvania Sen. John Fetterman says the Democrat is “on a path to recovery” after checking himself into a hospital for clinical depression earlier this month, and he is still expected to be away from the Senate for several weeks.
“We understand the intense interest in John’s status and especially appreciate the flood of well-wishes,” Fetterman’s communications director, Joe Calvello, said in a statement Monday afternoon. “However, as we have said this will be a weeks-long process and while we will be sure to keep folks updated as it progresses, this is all there is to give by way of an update.”
Fetterman is being treated at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center, where he checked in Feb. 15 as he was still struggling with the aftereffects of a stroke. His office said at the time that he had experienced depression “off and on throughout his life,” but it had only become severe in recent weeks. Capitol Physician Brian P. Monahan recommended his hospitalization after an evaluation, his office said then.
Pennsylvania Senator John Fetterman checked himself into a hospital last week treatment for depression. Many people praised his openness and his courage for voluntarily seeking inpatient treatment. More than 8% of Americans suffer from depression and many more experience depressive symptoms or have watched a loved one struggle with the disease.
Today, we’ll discuss the root causes of depression and changes in treatment. We’ll also look at why stigma persists and discuss the best ways to support a loved one who is battling the mental illness.
Pennsylvania Democratic Sen. John Fetterman is seeking treatment for severe depression months after having a stroke.
Here’s what’s known about the conditions.
What is a stroke?Strokes are a leading cause of death worldwide and affect almost 800,000 Americans each year. The World Health Organization estimates that about 1 in 4 people will have a stroke at some point in their lives.
Fetterman had the most common kind of stroke, caused by clots that block a blood vessel to the brain. The less common kind is due to a a burst or bleeding blood vessel.
When Patrick Kennedy was in Congress, he would sneak in his treatments for substance abuse over the holidays, in between congressional work periods. And he refused mental health treatment recommended by his doctors, worried he would be recognized in that wing of the hospital.
Kennedy, a Rhode Island Democrat and the son of the late Sen. Edward Kennedy, was eventually forced to reveal his struggles when he crashed his car outside the Capitol after taking a combination of prescription drugs in May 2006. He talked openly about his mental health and substance abuse for the first time, and something surprising happened — he became more popular with his constituency, winning reelection by a bigger margin than he had two years earlier.
On Thursday, the office of Pennsylvania Sen. John Fetterman, a Democrat who was elected to the Senate after a bruising campaign during which he suffered a stroke, announced he had checked himself into the hospital for clinical depression. The statement said Fetterman had experienced depression on and off in his life, but it had only become severe in recent weeks.
Fetterman’s public struggle is extraordinary in a building where few talk about their own mental health, even while members of both parties have legislation to expand aid for it. Kennedy and a handful of others who have been open about their own problems, or those in their family, say they hope Fetterman’s honesty — and his decisive action to get help — will foster more openness among lawmakers and their constituents in the wake of a global pandemic that has had far-reaching effects.
“This is a moment for us to tear down the stigma of depression and anxiety,” said Kennedy, who retired in 2010 and has become a leading voice on mental illness. “Sen. Fetterman may do more for people just by admitting that he’s getting help for depression than any bill he ends up sponsoring.”
The U.S. Surgeon General, Vivek Murphy, tweeted praise for Fetterman, saying he hopes his “courage will serve as an example for others.”
Fetterman’s Senate colleagues were immediately supportive.
“In every single city and town and rural community there is someone struggling with mental health,” said Minnesota Sen. Tina Smith, a Democrat who shared her own stories about periods of depression on the Senate floor four years ago. “If they see somebody else, like John, saying, ‘OK, I need to get medical care,’ that can be important to people.”
South Dakota’s John Thune, the Senate’s No. 2 Republican, said he thinks politicians have become more comfortable discussing the issue since the pandemic.
“The more open, transparent people can be, the better our understanding is,” Thune said.
Fetterman’s hospitalization comes after a rough year in which the 53-year-old suffered a stroke just ahead of the May primary election and spent much of the summer off the campaign trail, recovering. He has said the stroke nearly killed him. He also underwent surgery to implant a pacemaker with a defibrillator to manage two heart conditions, atrial fibrillation and cardiomyopathy. He entered the Senate in January, where he has had to adjust to life in Washington and the daily grind of a federal lawmaker.
“It’s unreal what @JohnFetterman has been through in the last year,” tweeted Sen. Chris Murphy, D-Conn. “A stroke, a recovery, a bruising campaign, a transition to the Senate. I’m so proud of him for taking his health seriously. He’s going to be a great Senator for a long time, and I’m pulling for him today.”
Texas Sen. John Cornyn said the Senate “can be arduous. So I’m sure if somebody is not up to 100% then it’s especially tough, so I wish him well.”
Post-stroke depression is common, doctors say. And that could be even more difficult when dealing with it publicly, like Fetterman is.
“Having a stroke in and of itself is devastating and having to recover from a stroke in the public eye only adds to the level of stress as one recovers,” said Dr. Bruce Ovbiagele, associate dean and professor of neurology at the University of California-San Francisco.
ennsylvania Democratic Sen. John Fetterman, still recovering from a stroke, has checked himself into Walter Reed National Military Medical Center to seek treatment for clinical depression, his office said Thursday.
Fetterman, who has struggled with the aftereffects of a stroke he suffered last May, checked himself in Wednesday night, it said.
“While John has experienced depression off and on throughout his life, it only became severe in recent weeks,” his chief of staff, Adam Jentleson, said in a statement.
Fetterman was evaluated Monday by the attending physician of Congress, Dr. Brian P. Monahan, who recommended inpatient care at Walter Reed, Jentleson said.
“John agreed, and he is receiving treatment on a voluntary basis,” Jentleson said. “After examining John, the doctors at Walter Reed told us that John is getting the care he needs, and will soon be back to himself.”
Fetterman, 53, is in his first weeks as a U.S. senator after winning the seat held by now-retired Republican Pat Toomey in a hard-fought contest against GOP nominee Dr. Mehmet Oz. Fetterman, who was Pennsylvania’s lieutenant governor, defeated the celebrity heart surgeon by 5 percentage points, flipping a seat that was key to Democrats holding the Senate majority.
Fetterman’s wife, Gisele, said she was proud of Fetterman “for asking for help and getting the care he needs.”
“After what he’s been through in the past year, there’s probably no one who wanted to talk about his own health less than John,” she wrote on Twitter.
Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer of New York said Fetterman “is getting the help he needs” and is expected to return soon, but declined to answer questions about Fetterman’s condition.
The Democratic caucus is “totally behind him,” Schumer said.
Fetterman suffered the stroke days before last May’s primary election and spent much of the summer recovering and off the campaign trail.
The stroke nearly killed him, he has said.
As a result of the stroke, Fetterman underwent surgery to implant a pacemaker with a defibrillator to manage two heart conditions, atrial fibrillation and cardiomyopathy.
He returned to campaigning in public in August, but refused to release his medical records or allow his doctors to answer reporters’ questions. His health became a central issue in the campaign, as Oz question of whether his opponent was honest about the effects of the stroke and whether Fetterman was fit to serve.
Working on a solution to gun violence and want to share it? Get in touch with gun violence prevention reporters Sammy Caiola and Sam Searles.
Altovise Love-Craighead stays composed when she cries, grazing her under eye with a neatly folded tissue from the box she keeps at her desk.
The Philadelphia Police Department chief inspector says she tears up whenever someone asks about her brother, Emir Peter Greene. He was fatally shot in Philadelphia in 1997 at the age of 20.
“But I’ll be fine,” Love-Craighead said in a recent interview with WHYY News. “Part of my trauma-informed [approach] is knowing what activates me and how to deal with it.”
Chief Inspector Altovise Love-Craighead sits at her desk at the Philadelphia Police Training Center. (Emma Lee/WHYY)Those who know Love-Craighead say it’s her personal understanding of grief, and her willingness to be vulnerable, that helps her build relationships in the communities she works in. It’s the kind of policing that some Philadelphians say is needed to combat the city’s gun violence crisis, and repair the public distrust in law enforcement that has come to the forefront following police killings of Black men — most recently the January killing of Tyre Nichols in Memphis.
The community policing model, which usually involves officers patrolling one neighborhood consistently and getting to know the residents who live there, has shown promise in other cities. In South Philly’s Grays Ferry neighborhood, some residents feel officers working with community members is part of why shooting rates there have dropped in the last two years.
But it requires a lot of human resources, and PPD is facing a severe officer shortage. And many residents oppose it, with some advocates calling for a shift away from law enforcement and toward health care, green spaces, and stable housing in the lead-up to 2024 budget discussions and the mayoral election.
“We know that more police and more cages has not made our society less violent,” reads the community-created 2023 People’s Platform for Just Philadelphia. “Yet our city continues to pour money into a police department that fails to protect and serve our communities and neglects the social services and public goods that actually create safety we can feel.”
The number of victims killed in the Turkey-Syria earthquake continues to climb…tens of thousands of people and counting. From afar, we see city blocks flattened and desperate families and rescue workers digging, listening and searching for survivors with fading hope.
What kind of mark does a natural disaster of this scale leave on survivors who have lost everything so suddenly? Is recovery for them even possible? And is there something unique about the trauma endured from an earthquake, hurricane or wildfire that is different from that of mass shootings, a terrorist attack or the daily threat of gun violence that is sadly commonplace in many U.S. cities?
GuestsAPRIL NATURALE, a traumatic stress specialist who directed the New York State response to the 9/11, helped launch the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline, and the National Disaster Distress Helpline.
ROBIN GURWITCH, a professor of psychology at Duke University School of Medicine and a senior advisor at the National Center for Child Traumatic Stress in the Terrorism and Disaster Program. She is currently in Moldova working with Ukrainian refugees.
The pandemic took a harsh toll on U.S. teen girls’ mental health, with almost 60% reporting feelings of persistent sadness or hopelessness, according to a government survey released Monday that bolsters earlier data.
Sexual violence, suicidal thoughts, suicidal behavior and other mental health woes affected many teens regardless of race or ethnicity, but girls and LGBTQ youth fared the worst on most measures, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention report. More than 17,000 U.S. high school students were surveyed in class in the fall of 2021.
In 30 years of collecting similar data, “we’ve never seen this kind of devastating, consistent findings,” said Kathleen Ethier, director of CDC’s adolescent and school health division. “There’s no question young people are telling us they are in crisis. The data really call on us to act.”
The research found:
- Among girls, 30% said they seriously considered attempting suicide, double the rate among boys and up almost 60% from a decade ago.
- Almost 20% of girls reported experiencing rape or other sexual violence in the previous year, also an increase over previous years.
- Almost half of LGBTQ students said they had seriously considered a suicide attempt.
- More than a quarter of American Indians and Alaska Natives said they had seriously considered a suicide attempt — higher than other races and ethnicities.
- Feelings of persistent sadness and hopelessness affected more than one-third of kids of all races and ethnicities and increased over previous years.
- Recent poor mental health was reported by half of LGBTQ kids and almost one-third of American Indian and Alaska Native youth.
The results echo previous surveys and reports and many of the trends began before the pandemic. But isolation, online schooling and increased reliance on social media during the pandemic made things worse for many kids, mental health experts say.
Gun violence in Philadelphia takes a toll on students and their ability to learn and succeed. WHYY News’ gun violence, education, and health reporters look at the intersection of schools and violence in their new six-part series, “Safe Place.”
Working on a solution to gun violence and want to share it? Get in touch with gun violence prevention reporters Sammy Caiola and Sam Searles.
Four teenage boys crowded around a small table in the living room, intensely focused on the Uno cards in their hands.
It was a Sunday afternoon, and they were at Ivan Cuevas’ house in Northeast Philadelphia. The boys have known each other since they were about 10, and the card game has always been their thing. They played in teams of two.
“UNO!” Ivan shouted, and looked to his teammate Joey.
“Whoa, whoa, whoa,” the other boys shouted.
“I was about to change it to green, bro. We just lost!” Jaymeir said as he turned to his teammate, Jalil.
WHYY News is withholding the teens’ last names because they are minors dealing with trauma.
Ivan Cuevas, 18 (second from right) and his friends play their favorite game, Uno, at Cuevas’ home in Northeast Philadelphia. (Kimberly Paynter/WHYY)The boys used to go to Jean’s Pizza and Grill, across the street from Abraham Lincoln High School, after class to eat and play Uno. On Oct. 18, 2021, Ivan was standing outside Jean’s with some of his classmates right after school when they heard the sound of gunfire nearby.
Everyone ran in different directions. But before Ivan could get far, a bullet struck the back of his head, landing millimeters from his brainstem, which regulates most of the body’s automatic functions, like breathing and heart rate.
Ivan spent about a month in the intensive care unit at St. Christopher’s Hospital for Children. When he should have been out celebrating his 17th birthday, he was lying in a hospital bed hooked up to tubes and wires on life support.
His injury was so critical that doctors didn’t think he was going to make it. And if he did, they said, he might not walk again, let alone hear or speak.
Meanwhile, Ivan’s family — his mother, Natali Rosario, her fiancé, Rhiannon Hope, and his siblings — were experiencing a different kind of trauma.
What made it even harder, Rosario said, was watching the devastation play out among her son’s closest friends.
The day of the shooting, the boys sat in hospital waiting rooms, crowded the hallways until they were ushered outside, and even lingered in the hospital parking lot for hours, refusing to leave even when their parents pleaded with them to come home.
“I got sick, I cried so much,” Joey said.
Ivan Cuevas, 18 (right) and his friend Joey (left) have matching tattoos. (Kimberly Paynter/WHYY)Ivan was one of 212 kids who was a primary victim of gun violence in Philadelphia that year. Another 217 kids were primary victims of gun violence in 2022, according to city data.
Ivan’s friends were among the hundreds — maybe even thousands — more kids across the city who could be considered secondary victims as they have suffered trauma from the harm to or loss of friends and family.
When was the last time you flew too high on a swing and lost your stomach, or busted out laughing so hard that you started crying?
If it’s been awhile since you’ve had this kind of fun, you’re not alone.
A lot of us are still recovering from antisocial habits formed in the pandemic. And these days, events outside of our control are taking a serious toll on our health. Last fall, 76% of adults surveyed by the American Psychological Association said stress from politics, race relations, violence and inflation has affected their health. They report experiencing headaches, fatigue, depression, nervousness and exhaustion.
But the antidote may be hiding in plain sight. Two recent books argue that making room for more fun in your life could counteract both the stress and the tendency to escape it by zoning out online.
In The Fun Habit: How The Disciplined Pursuit of Joy And Wonder Can Change Your Life, published in January, psychologist Mike Rucker makes the case that pursuit of fun experiences may be even more valuable than seeking the sometimes abstract goal of happiness.
“Happiness is a state of mind,” Rucker writes. “But fun is something you can do. It doesn’t require education, money or power. All it requires is intentionality. If happiness is a mirage, fun is your backyard oasis.”
And science journalist Catherine Price, author of The Power of Fun, published in 2021, has a similar view. (She took a break from her latest interest, online blues piano lessons, to take my call.)
“We really trivialize fun and we are so casual and sloppy about how we use the word,” Price says, but it is “essential for our happiness and health.”
And fun can be so many things. Last year, when NPR asked readers to share what they’re really into, more than 1,500 of you responded with a deliciously wide range of pursuits, from hula hooping to home brewing beer to raising reptiles. And more than 800 said you do these activities just because they’re fun.
Here’s advice from Price and Rucker — and inspiration from NPR readers — for ways to build more fun into your life.
- Stop worrying about how happy you areAs a founding member of the International Positive Psychology Association, Rucker has put many teachings of happiness science into his life, like keeping a gratitude journal. But after his brother died unexpectedly in 2016, Rucker felt burned out and lonely. He began to feel that the more he pursued happiness, the more elusive it became.
“Happiness is really an evaluation,” he says. You are constantly asking yourself what is going right and what is going wrong. It can become a trap, he warns.
People who highly value happiness may end up feeling “disappointed about how they feel, paradoxically decreasing their happiness the more they want it,” wrote the authors of a 2011 study in the journal Emotion.
In contrast, fun is relatively easy to achieve yet many adults are conditioned to believe that it isn’t important, and experience very little of it. For Rucker, seeking lighter moments helped him through his loss.
“Even if you’re not happy, you can have fun, even if that’s just having coffee with a friend,” he says. “For me, it was certainly going to comedy clubs [after my brother died]. I wasn’t happy, but I was really enjoying the jokes.”
Science has just begun to study the importance of fun and play, so there’s not a strict definition. But Rucker writes that fun generally involves doing something active and intentional (as opposed to mindlessly watching TV), often includes other people, is something you choose for yourself, and can give a thrill that transcends the ordinary.
NPR audience member Lynn Braz found that when she started taking flying trapeze classes at age 42: “Now, at age 61, I am flying every weekend throughout the warmer months. Flying trapeze is the hardest, scariest, most exciting and most fun thing I’ve ever done.”
Price, who also is the founder of ScreenLifeBalance.com, defines fun as a state in which we experience playfulness, connection to others, and flow – that feeling where you lose track of time because you’re “in the zone” and not worried about how you look or how well you perform.
- Find your ‘fun magnets’If you’re not sure where to start, Price recommends you ask yourself: What are my “fun magnets?”
“Put your phone away for a while and come up with three to four memories when you had real fun,” she advises.
Look for common threads, like which people are involved, what kinds of activities you enjoy, where do they take place. Are there activities that would be fun that you’d like to try? Are there activities you can get rid of that are not fun?
Fun can be many different things, Rucker says. It’s really whatever tickles your sense of delight.
NPR’s audience shared hundreds of ideas about what turns them on.
Tara Fisher described her love of building and fighting with robots. “It’s a great way to learn lots of STEM skills and meet fun, intelligent people,” she wrote. “Plus, it’s fun to smash each other’s ‘toys.'”
Nicole Diekow told NPR, that for her, it’s thrift shopping. She’s been doing it since the 1980s when she and her mom were on a tight budget. “This sparked a fascination that has stuck around my whole life … You never know what treasures you might find or what friends you may meet.”
- Put fun on the calendarOnce you identify what fun is to you, you can start to schedule more of it. “It’s like going on a diet by figuring out what kinds of foods you love, and then eating more,” says Price.
I know – groan. Scheduling fun? Isn’t it supposed to be spontaneous? And aren’t we overscheduled already?
But fun comes more easily when you’re young, says Price. When you’re older, you don’t find yourself in the kind of unstructured environments conducive to fun, like a playground full of kids you don’t know.
Sometimes people you could have fun with are waiting for an invitation. “It’s like romance,” she says of scheduling fun. “You need to light some candles, set the scene.”
But it’s well worth it. People who take a vacation return to their work less stressed and possibly more creative, and the benefits could extend to smaller adventures.
When you put something fun like a hike on the calendar, you open up to moments of “awe and wonder,” like the surprise appearance of a deer on the path, for example, Rucker says. These moments can improve mood and lower stress levels, which can reduce the risk of heart disease and diabetes.
Scheduling fun doesn’t have to be arduous or expensive. When Price was working on her book during the height of the pandemic, she recruited a virtual group of people — a Fun Squad — to bounce ideas around with.
One Fun Squad friend said that a Taco Tuesday night she held with her friends was the highlight of her week, Price says. For herself, she regularly jams with a group of musicians.
NPR reader Nancy Lomini-Perretta decided to try a beginning mahjongg class for seniors at her local college in 2019. Now she plays every Monday with a group of women she met in that class. They call themselves “The Fabulous Five” or “The Mahvelous Mahjongg Madams.”
“Taking this class … brought five women together who happen to have the same sense of humor and just plain enjoy each other’s company,” she says.
- Unplug (no, but seriously!)Pay attention to how much of your leisure time is spent scrolling on a phone or passively watching TV, Rucker advises. That’s “yielding to the nothing,” he says, and is a deceptively easy escape from feelings of boredom or discomfort.
Most of us have control over at least two hours of our day for leisure activities, and some of us have up to five hours. But the average American uses up more than two hours on social media per day. Consider using your time instead to do “just one thing that used to bring you joy,” suggests Rucker.
Technology can be the enemy of fun. If you’re always connected to your phone, checking that one last email or text, you’re not present. Rucker says. “We need to “stop being ‘on’ all the time.”
When Rucker realized he was checking his phone often while watching his daughter take gymnastics class, he decided instead that they should take a dance class together. “Now we have amazing memories,” he says.
Real fun usually involves sensory experiences and, often, interactions with other people.
NPR listener Rachel Maryam Smith fell in love with making giant soap bubbles when she was in college. She soon started making them in public, eventually hosting events with up to 300 people. She loves that bubbles put a smile on everyone’s face.
“Big bubble making [is] more than the jaw-dropping aesthetics, but a reminder that life is brief and beautiful,” she wrote.
Action seeker and NPR fan says Mike Ferris practicing handstands “feels like flight at 33 years old.” He encourages others to try it too: “Who hasn’t tried a handstand once in their life, at least as children? It’s simply fun to do a move that our bodies aren’t designed to do to survive.”
- Share the fun and amplify itAnother tip Price swears by for more fun is sharing what brings you delight with someone else. Price now has running text chains with several friends who send her photos of upbeat moments throughout their day. Just for fun, she recently sent some friends $10 disco balls she discovered on Amazon so they could delight in their own dance parties.
She borrowed the idea from poet Ross Gay, who wrote an entire book of essays on delights, including odes to handmade infinity scarves, loitering and weeds.
NPR listener Kami Koontz shares her source of fun whenever she can. She bought a ukulele in early 2014 on a whim and taught herself to play it.
“I have since started a local uke group, a local uke band, and have raised money to donate Ukes to schools and libraries,” she writes. “Doing all of these things has brought a variety of charming people into my life, a little music family of sorts.”
Like any new habit, fun takes practice, as well as trial and error. Experts say start small and build.
“It’s harder to get to spontaneity if you have to schedule it on your calendar, but once you do, you’re creating more opportunity for spontaneity to happen,” Rucker says.
Carmel Wroth contributed to this report.
What makes a happy and healthy life? That’s the question at the heart of the longest study on happiness, the Harvard Study of Adult Development, which began in 1938. Researchers have been following participants for 84 years, trying to untangle what it takes to thrive in this world. And the answer they found? Fulfilling relationships.
In our debut episode of The Connection, we’ll talk with study’s researchers about the key findings and discuss why good relationships — with our romantic partners, our friends, our co-workers and neighbors — are the essential ingredient to happy lives. They are the co-authors of the new book, The Good Life: Lessons from the World’s Longest Happiness Study.
Our guestsROBERT WALDINGER, professor of psychiatry at Harvard University and director of the Harvard Study of Adult Development.
MARC SCHULZ, professor of psychology at Bryn Mawr College and associate director of the Harvard Study of Adult Development.
This story is from The Pulse, a weekly health and science podcast.
Find it on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.
If you listen to basically any podcast you’ve probably heard of them: BetterHelp, Talkspace and others.
Online subscription therapy platforms exploded during and after the coronavirus pandemic.
There’s no shortage of comedians, YouTubers, athletes, and actors singing the praises of these online subscription therapy apps, but therapists themselves — the very people that make these platforms possible — very often tell a different story.
Like the rest of us, Pennsylvania counselor Amy Kemp heard about BetterHelp on one of her favorite podcasts. The concept appealed to her at first.
“Of course, therapy being more accessible sounds like a great thing. I actually was kind of supportive of it at that point in thinking that it was a way for people to access care,” Kemp said.
But when she looked into it online, she found horror stories on Facebook groups and forums. Users and therapists complaining about low quality therapy and poor business practices.
“One other story that came up in one … was somebody was notified that their therapist had died and that they basically just got refunded that week and told another therapist will be in touch with you shortly,” she said.
It was so corporate it was off-putting. Like, “sorry your therapist expired, we’ll replace them.” The more Kemp looked into online subscription therapy the stranger it seemed. The further it got from the traditional therapy she was used to.
“When I started seeing people can text you and call you and try to message you day and night — that’s not how therapy works,” she said.
It’s a common selling point with online subscription therapy that a therapist is going to be available whenever you need them.
Which Kemp argues is kind of the opposite of what therapy is supposed to do: You’re supposed to get well enough to deal with your issues on your own — without having to rely on a clinician.
“You need that space to be able to say, ‘Okay, I can start to trust myself again in this issue, in my depression, in my anxiety, in my grief,” she said. “And not create this dependency, this need for this other person.”
But, Kemp says what really tipped a lot of therapists against these apps were privacy issues. The way some of these apps can track user behavior across all kinds of different platforms.
“There’s no reason that Facebook needs to know every time somebody logs in to just say, ‘hey, I need some support around something.’ It just doesn’t even make sense,” she said. “I mean, it’s completely unethical.”
Therapy is a practice built on confidentiality and privacy, the things we tell our therapists we tell no one else. So this type of thing was completely alien to a lot of therapists.
“I’ve seen that somebody can see when you’re on the app or when you’re available, but not really available because you’re just checking something. It’s very intrusive and really, really disturbing,” Kemp said.
But despite all of these concerns, many therapists work for online, on-demand services like BetterHelp. I spoke with one. We’re calling her Cassandra because she’s worried about getting sued for talking about her experience working for BetterHelp.
She’d been a therapist for about a decade but a sudden health problem a couple of years back meant she could no longer work in an office. Then a colleague reached out to her about an opportunity.
“He said, ‘hey, [you] have your independent license. You can work from home. I work for BetterHelp right now. And, you know, maybe that would be a good option for you,’” she said. “So, we talked about it. I didn’t know this at the time, but BetterHelp offers therapists like $2-300 to recruit other therapists. So it wasn’t coming from like the kindness of his heart or anything.”
Cassandra didn’t bite, instead she looked on job boards, searching for remote therapist positions, and there seemed to be a ton.
“One company was called Gotham. There was another one called Guideline,” she said. “And I didn’t know that these were all linked to BetterHelp. I had no idea.” she said.
They had different names, but one goal, farm therapists out to BetterHelp.
She finally found a remote job that seemed like a good fit, and it wasn’t BetterHelp, she thought.
“He told me, actually, once we had a phone call. That’s the thing. We had emails back and forth, and he never said anything in the emails [about BetterHelp] until I had a phone call with this guy,” she said.
Yep, another BetterHelp recruiter.
Cassandra was surrounded. She thought, oh well, her friend did BetterHelp, she didn’t have any other options. So she went for it.
She did a two week onboarding, sent in her licenses. She filled out her qualifications, what types of issues she treats, things like substance abuse, trauma and mood disorders, then the app would find clients, and refer them to her. There was even an option to accelerate her referrals.
“So I said, okay, I guess the faster I build up my caseload, the better for me, I guess. So I turned on the accelerator,” she said. “I was getting referrals left and right from people that I would never treat. I got a referral from someone in Puerto Rico who was struggling with pedophilia issues that I was like, ‘whoa, whoa, whoa. I’m not touching that. I don’t have the training.’”
It was an early red flag, but she persisted. Even after turning away clients with issues way outside her practice, Cassandra soon had an unwieldy case load.
“I believe I had like 30, 32 [clients]. I would get messages all hours of the day and BetterHelp does this thing where if you don’t respond within 24 hours and you leave a few unresponded, they actually suspend your account,” she said. “So, I had to respond within 24 hours. So, I would be done with one client and then I’d be on the app, responding to messages, just responding, responding, responding like sending out worksheets, doing all this other stuff because if I didn’t — I would get penalized for it.”
It got so bad she says she’d be juggling clients while cooking dinner.
The Pew Charitable Trusts last week awarded $4 million in grant funding to the Esperanza Health Center, a nonprofit organization in North Philadelphia.
The center, which offers services ranging from primary to prenatal health care, has become a staple in Kensington.
The grant money — paid over five years — will help support the organization’s daily operations. Esperanza seeks to bolster its behavioral and community health staff to provide more peer counseling and group therapy for Kensington residents.
Got a question about life in Philly’s suburbs? Our suburban reporters want to hear from you! Ask us a question or send an idea for a story you think we should cover.
The National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI) has returned to Chester County. The local chapter, based in Exton, will provide support and education for people in the county dealing with mental illnesses as well as their families.
Sara Wein, a licensed social worker and West Chester resident, is spearheading the charge as the new executive director for NAMI Chester County.
“Our hope is that our chapter is going to be able to implement some of these peer support as well as family support services here in Chester County,” Wein said. “So really bringing these folks to our community members who have really indicated and shared and have been sharing for quite some time that these services are really needed.”
Chester County previously had a NAMI chapter. However, the all-volunteer organization was dependent on the old NAMI state organization, which shuttered in 2015. The new state organization, NAMI Keystone PA, is reconstructing the new NAMI Chester County.
One of the hottest tickets at this year’s Society for Neuroscience meeting in San Diego was a session on psychedelic drugs.
About 1,000 brain scientists squeezed into an auditorium at the San Diego Convention Center for the symposium, called Psychedelics and Neural Plasticity.
They’d come to hear talks on how drugs like psilocybin and MDMA can alter individual brain cells, can help rewire the brain, and may offer a new way to treat disorders ranging from depression to chronic pain.
“I was pleasantly surprised at the number of people,” says Alex Kwan, a biomedical engineer at Cornell University who spoke at the session.
“In the last couple of years there has been a lot of public excitement about psychedelics,” Kwan says. “The scientists are catching on now that we just don’t know much about what these compounds do.”
So during the session, Kwan and several other researchers shared what they are learning about the drugs.
Rewiring the brainKwan described his own work on how psilocybin, the active ingredient in magic mushrooms, seems to help the brain rewire by generating new connections between neurons.
A study of mice found that psilocybin altered dendrites, the branch-like structures that extend from a nerve cell and receive input from other cells.
Dendrites form connections through small protrusions known as dendritic spines. And in mice that got psilocybin, the size and number of these spines increased by about 10%, which allowed cells to form new connections.
“When we give mice a single dose of psilocybin, we can see those new connections form within a day,” Kwan says. “And then they can last more than a month,” which is the equivalent of many months in a human.
New connections are a critical part of the rewiring process known as brain plasticity, which allows the brain to learn and adapt.
“Psychedelics seem to elevate plasticity,” Kwan says.
One-and-done treatment?Brain plasticity may explain why a single dose of a psychedelic drug can have a long-lasting impact on disorders like anxiety, depression and PTSD.
“It can be months or years,” says Dr. Gitte Knudsen a neurologist from University of Copenhagen in Denmark who spoke at the psychedelics session. “It’s a stunning effect.”
These long-term effects have been shown with drugs including psilocybin, LSD and DMT (ayahuasca), Knudsen says. In contrast, most existing psychiatric drugs need to be taken every day.
But psychedelic drugs have some drawbacks. They can cause nausea or produce hallucinations that are frightening or unpleasant.
“It can be a quite overwhelming experience to people,” Knudsen says. “And for that reason, you need to prepare them for that, and you also need to be with them while they are in the experience.”
Even when patients are well prepared for a session, Knudsen says, they may have mixed feelings afterward.
“When people have been through a psychedelic experience in my lab, they say, ‘Wow this was amazing, this was just a fantastic experience,'” she says. “And you ask them, ‘Well, would you like to come back next week for another session?’ They say, ‘Thank you, but no thank you.’ ”
Psychedelics in the mainstreamThe fact that psychedelics were featured at the world’s largest meeting of brain scientists suggests the drugs are poised to enter the scientific mainstream. That’s a recent development.
Psychedelic research was popular in the 1950s but pretty much ended after the mid-1960s when the drugs were made illegal in the U.S. and Europe.
In the 1990s, a few researchers began cautiously studying how drugs like LSD, MDMA and psilocybin might help with psychiatric conditions like depression and PTSD.
And in 2016, a pair of studies published by prominent researchers “really piqued everyone’s interest,” says Dr. Joshua Gordon, who directs the National Institute of Mental Health.
Both studies found that a single treatment with psilocybin reduced anxiety and depression in cancer patients.
That has led to some large studies of psychedelics, including one published in The New England Journal of Medicine in November showing that psilocybin helped people with major depression who hadn’t been helped by other treatments.
Studies like that one suggest that psychedelics “are going to be beneficial and useful” in treating psychiatric disorders, Gordon says.
But the effects found in large studies of psychedelics have been much less dramatic than in some of the earlier, smaller studies, Gordon says. Also, he says, some companies hoping to market psychedelics have overstated their benefits.
“There is a lot of hype,” he says, “and a lot of hope.”
Copyright 2022 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.
Jewish Family Services of Delaware just got the second largest federal grant ever. The $3.5 million funding will help support the group’s newest mental health program.
JFS has been serving the community for over 120 years, offering counseling and support services based on Jewish values to strengthen individuals, families, and the community. Some of these services include mental health care, cancer care, older adult services, dementia care, support services, and refugee services.
Mental health has become a nationwide issue, with a 2020 survey from the National Institute of Mental Health indicating that 52.9 million adults aged 18 and older had a mental illness, while only 24.3 million received any care.
Got a question about life in Philly’s suburbs? Our suburban reporters want to hear from you! Ask us a question or send an idea for a story you think we should cover.
The need for mental health services in Chester County is growing faster than local agencies’ ability to provide it.
“Like every community in Pennsylvania and, frankly, nationally, we’re seeing increasing levels of mental and behavioral health issues and challenges, both in children and youth as well as adults of all ages,” said Jason Alexander, co-founder of West Chester-based Capacity for Change LLC.
Alexander is working with Chester County officials to improve health and human services in the county.
Their plans include deploying mobile mental health crisis teams to reach community members in need across the county.
“We see the role of our county government to set up a mobile mental crisis unit to go into communities where folks might be dealing with drug or alcohol issues, maybe coping with a traumatic experience, and might need some peer support. We’ll be able to get them the health outcomes that they deserve and maybe in the long run, keep folks from getting into serious trouble,” Chester County Commissioner Josh Maxwell.
The planning process for a new mental health services systemFor the past year, a 45-member committee of county stakeholders has been meeting to identify what would make a better crisis response system in Chester County for people with mental and behavioral health needs.
Also included in the planning process, Alexander said, were people with lived experiences within the existing system.
The federal Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration is awarding additional funding to states and U.S. territories for an expansion of mental health and substance use crisis services, specifically local operations of the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline.
Pennsylvania, Delaware, and New Jersey will get about $3.5 million, collectively.
The 988 helpline is a national service, but callers seeking help for a mental health crisis are often put through to experts and providers in the areas nearest to where they live.
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The problems brought by the ongoing coronavirus pandemic continue to have a domino effect on Delaware County.
Delco residents need more help with food and mental health services than they did before the pandemic.
“I’m sure you can imagine that with the fact that everything — whether it’s heating cost or food costs or housing costs, gas — with everything increasing generally, our paychecks don’t rise,” said Joanne Craig, chief impact officer of the Foundation for Delaware County.
Craig said with Delco residents paying more of their budgets to make sure that they can heat their homes or keep roofs over their heads, they’re being forced to take money away from something else that they may have budgeted for.
As a result, many folks are caught in an impossible situation and need to seek resources from elsewhere to stay afloat. The Foundation outlined this need in its annual report.
Ellie Crowell, the Delaware County program director for Share Food Program, said data from their affiliated food pantries show huge increases in visitors from 2021 to 2022 “across every metric.”
“One of the most marked increases we saw was the number of new individuals,” Crowell said. They saw over 18,000 new people between July and September — a 68% increase compared to the same three-month period the year before.
This story is from Stop and Frisk, a podcast production from WHYY News and Temple University’s Logan Center for Urban Investigative Reporting
Find it on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.
How do you feel about stop and frisk (and policing more broadly) as an answer to Philly’s gun violence crisis? Get in touch
I will always remember my first time getting stopped by the police. I was 22, living in South Jersey, and was driving home from a movie date.
I remembered my parents giving me “the talk” many years ago: Keep both hands on the wheel, be compliant — always answer with “yes, sir” or “no, sir.” I was sweating a lot. I could barely keep my hands from shaking. My heart was racing, my stomach was queasy, and combined with the flashing red and blue lights, which illuminated the inside of my whole car, it almost felt like a near-death experience.
I thought about what happened to Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, that summer. I feared that one wrong move — just fidgeting with my hands or legs — and that could be it. I would join a long line of unarmed Black men killed by the police.
During that police stop, I asked a lot of questions to myself: Does this officer see me as a threat? Was I being targeted? Did I have a right to defend myself if I thought my life was in danger? It turned out I had been stopped for a broken tail light. I didn’t even get a ticket. A few minutes later, I was back on the road. It turned out that my tail light wasn’t really broken, though. And that nervous feeling stuck with me.
That first police stop changed my entire perception of safety. To this day, my anxiety billows if I see a Ford F-150 or Dodge Charger behind me. It’s the kind of vigilance, the buzzing anxiety of fight or flight, many Black people feel when they see police officers.
North Philadelphia therapist Ron Crawford plainly summarized how some Black people may feel. “The normal is every time I hear a police siren and I look in the mirror, I get anxious. That’s normal.”
Crawford has spent 20 years in the city working with individuals with histories of substance use, mental health issues, and incarceration. And, as a Black man, he is no stranger to traumatic interactions with police.
“I had an uncle who was physically abused when he was arrested,” he said. “The pain that permeated through my family as a result of what we witnessed, it kind of changed my reactions or my interactions with police because I understood that that could happen.”
Crawford is a Philadelphia native who grew up right around the corner from his office, at Huntingdon Street and Lehigh Avenue. Growing up in North Philly during the 1980s, Crawford was exposed to what he called a “cycle of violence” — drugs, policing, racism, and rioting.
Ron sees a similar “cycle of violence” happening in Philadelphia today.
“I’m a middle-aged man and living in Philadelphia recently, I’m afraid. It’s dangerous.” And he feels a similar fear about potential police interactions.
Cambodian American Eden Teng was was born in a refugee camp on the border of Thailand and Cambodia just a few years after the Cambodian genocide.
U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy visited with young leaders in Wilmington with a focus on mental health problems made worse by the pandemic.
New legislation would require school districts to update health curriculums to include lessons on the symptoms of grief and ways to cope.
Local poet LindoYes! Is distributing free positive poetry and access to city behavioral health resources through nostalgic gumball machines.
This week, the New Jersey Senate Military and Veterans Affairs Committee met to discuss mental health and suicide prevention services for veterans.
Sadboy Fanatics hosts group sessions for fans to express their frustrations and introduce them to new mental health practices.
Rebecca Soffer wished she had a handbook on how to grieve after losing her parents, so she wrote one. She joins us to share insights, exercises and tools for surviving loss.
Gralin Hughes’ “Supine Horizons” is an immersive art installation promoting the political urgency of taking a break.
New collaborative effort offers mental health services for about 1,500 students in Wilmington’s Community Education Building.
Some teens admit to being addicted to their screens...but for this generation, phones and tablets are critical to daily life. The authors of a new book, Behind Their Screens.
The first generation of kids to receive intensive ABA has grown up — and many have criticized it as harmful and even abusive.
The U.S. surgeon general chose Philadelphia as the site to launch a national guide for how employers can improve workplace mental health and wellness.
County jails across Pennsylvania lack the resources to address a growing mental health crisis, putting some of the most vulnerable incarcerated people at heightened risk.
This week, the Phillies and Union continue their playoff runs. The 76ers tip off in their regular season opener Tuesday.
As Smith moved up in the game he loved, the anxiety stayed with him. It grew out of control in Philadelphia — and when he couldn’t perform it spiraled.
A WITF investigation finds that corrections officers use physical force on people who may be unable to comply with orders due to a mental health condition.
Researchers at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia studied how exposure therapy can help kids overcome excessive anxiety related to their food allergies.
Sales of books for young people on violence, grief, and emotions have increased for nine straight years, with nearly six million copies sold in 2021.
Author Daniel Pink says having regrets is natural and that confronting them can lead to personal growth, better decisions and relationships, and happier lives.
An annual survey from CVS Health and Morning Consult found that more Black Americans are reporting mental health concerns.
New Jersey Citizen Action, with representatives from a South Jersey high school, is urging the Legislature to allow early health intervention for grades 9-12.
Across Philadelphia, teachers are grappling with how to discuss Tuesday’s shooting at Roxborough High with frustrated and fearful students.
The state-funded program currently serves about 200 new moms who receive or are eligible for Medicaid benefits. A $4 million infusion should aid even more.
There's a lot of excitement around using psychedelic drugs for mental health treatment. This hour, the potential, risks and hype around psychedelics and mental health care.
At a roundtable hosted by Maiken Scott, WHYY and Mighty Writers explore how the pandemic has impacted the mental health of children.
Over the past decade, access to mental health staff for Black students decreased, while white students’ access increased.
Education reporter Anya Kamenetz on "The Stolen Year" about how we failed kids during the pandemic and the toll school closures had on their lives.
This Labor Day, we revisit some of the summer's most fascinating interviews, like the huge Revolutionary War discovery at the Red Bank Battlefield in New Jersey.
After the disruption and trauma of the pandemic, teachers are expecting kids to still need added support. They're adapting their lesson plans to start with a mental check-in.
A new garden opens in memory of victims of opioid overdose. Plus, Michael Nutter on what Philadelphians should expect from the city's next mayor. And, Eagles season kicks off.
In a mental health crisis, a conversation with an empathetic listener can be life-saving. But when someone needs in-person help, there's a shortage of resources in many areas.
Closing your laptop at 5 p.m. Doing only your assigned tasks. Spending more time with family. These are just some of the common examples.
Advocates cheered the launch of the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline, but some voiced concerns that using the service could lead to police involvement or forced hospitalization.
A report published Monday by Children First shows COVID’s toll on young Philadelphians. Students and child advocates want more school-based services.
The nonprofits were selected for their focus on youth mental wellness and for focusing on practices regarding inclusion, access, and equity.
More than 40% of children report struggles with persistent sadness and desperation. Doctors, patients, parents, and politicians urged more services.
Psychologists play a critical role in K-12 schools, but there's a clear mismatch between the demographics of school psychologists and the student populations they serve.
Starting Saturday, people having a mental health crisis will be able to call or text 9-8-8 to be connected with a mental health professional.
Every school district will receive $100,000 as a base grant and charter school entities will receive $70,000.
Everything you need to know about Monkeypox right now. Also, the struggles facing NJ produce farmers, and we talk about a Library Company mental health exhibition.
Funds are earmarked for children’s programs, suicide prevention, training more mental health professionals, crisis hotline and more.
In the immediate aftermath of overturning Roe v. Wade, a look at the abortion debate, access to reproductive healthcare and the challenges for pregnant people turned away.
A new mental health hotline expected to roll out; carriage horse protesters back on the street; we remember Dr. Fred Simeone who passed away at the age of 86.
While acknowledging the unique challenges that Black fathers and children face, Hannon’s goal is to also share the joys of being a parent.
A new Penn study shows museums – in particular art museums – are good at reducing anxiety and depression.
While a growing number of states are trying to address the mental health crisis among youths, many schools are woefully short of therapists and the budget to hire them.
The Assembly Education Comm. cleared bipartisan legislation that would require each school district to develop a “behavioral threat assessment team.”
A program that began in Cumberland Co., pairing a plainclothes state trooper with a certified mental health screener, will expand to Union Co.
The “Ready. Set. School” campaign will have free days at the children’s museum for health awareness games and COVID shots.
Rebecca Soffer, co-founder of the Modern Loss website and community, shares tools, exercises, thoughts and practical advice for grieving in "The Modern Loss Handbook."
Patient memoirs of 19th-century asylums tell the good, the bad, and the ugly from the early days of institutional mental health treatment.
Members of the DA’s office CARES team asked for some compassion for the people working to help others at their worst moments in life.
In many schools, the Buffalo shooting and others before it have prompted staff discussions on how they might respond to students' threats of violence.
The canines will be there to comfort emergency responders, families and friends of the victims, as well as the community.
After crucial federal funding was finally secured, Delco officials plan to dispatch mental health experts alongside police officers during mental health calls.
A Yardley couple is suing Bucks County and 10 county jail employees over what they allege were civil rights violations against their daughter, 29-year-old Kim Stringer.
The nonprofit provides grief counseling through peer and crisis support for children and teens grades K-12 who have experienced the death of someone significant in their lives
In light of the growing kids' mental health crisis, the group says it's crucial to identify kids who are struggling.
Trauma and stress wreak havoc on the human body after prolonged exposure. Over time, sleep, attention, memory, mood, physical appearance and so much else are impacted.
Kids started remote learning over two years ago, and new CDC reports say their mental health has sharply declined, with many citing physical and emotional abuse at home.
The initiative teams Bloom Planning and Delaware County in an effort to revamp mental and behavioral health services for school children.
When Jake Odmark was diagnosed with Crohn's disease, his career took a back seat. But accepting the diagnosis led to a more stable future.
How do children survive the trauma of war -- the violence they've witnessed, the loss of loved ones and their home, and the displacement?
November saw a record-breaking 4.5 million people leave their jobs, including 143,000 Pennsylvanians.
A federal judge in Philadelphia has approved new rules that seek to eliminate racial bias in the testing and payout of NFL concussion claims.
With Long Covid, millions of people suffer from clusters of symptoms ranging in severity. And, Philadelphia's Covid-19 level is "All Clear": most mandates lifted.
The past two years have been a tough slog for Black people, especially those with fewer resources. Ladipo's services have never been more important.
The federally funded online classes are available to help health care workers or anyone to help improve mental health and cope with trauma.
Since most Olympians don't win a medal and many don't even qualify for the finals, returning home after the Games can be hard.
Trenton Mayor Reed Gusciora hopes addressing mental health will stem the record bloodshed in New Jersey’s capital city.
It's another discombobulating moment in the pandemic, with conflicting signs of where the virus is heading and what people should do about it on a daily basis.
Ben Simmons says his mental health struggles began well before the 76ers’ season ended and he didn’t believe he’d be able to overcome them in Philadelphia.
Seasonal Affective Disorder has millions of Americans feeling depressed this winter. A cure for Leukemia comes from a Penn scientist. And, the Free library has a new director.
Pennsylvanians will be able to call 988, a new hotline for mental health crises, by July. The aim is to make it easier for those experiencing mental health issues to gain access to intervention services and, ideally, avoid interactions with police.
Callers will be connected with telephone trauma-informed counselors, mobile crisis units and co-responder services, and stabilizing, long-term mental health programs.
The new line is part of the National Suicide Hotline Designation Act of 2020, which established 988 as the nationwide number for the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline and Veterans Crisis Line.
The law is supposed to help increase capacity for mental health networks. But Philadelphia area mental health service providers are concerned about having the necessary infrastructure to adequately answer calls in time.
Philadelphia experienced a record number of homicides in 2021. Five hundred sixty-two people were murdered, with the majority dying as a result of gun violence. While advocates tend to focus resources on the families of slain victims, thousands more survived shootings last year and are working to cope with the trauma.
Oronde McClain understands the pain of surviving gun violence. He was shot in the head at age 10 in Philadelphia, and it took him 12 years to recover from his injuries. Two decades later, he’s no longer a victim. Instead, he has transformed into a survivor and activist. The married father of five is also an author of the book, “PTSD Won’t Define Me.”
McClain shared his story with WHYY host Cherri Gregg.
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I hear one of your little ones back there.
Yeah, I’m home with them today.
Well, welcome.
Thank you for having me.
Are you a chronic dieter who’s tried everything from counting calories and points, cutting carbohydrates, buying shakes and pre-packaged meals, and following random advice after endlessly scrolling weight loss blogs? Science is increasingly suggesting that these diets simply don’t work. They’re unsustainable, frustrating “quick fixes” that can create unhealthy relationships with food and end up harming your physical and mental health in the long run.
Guests Laura Iu, Registered dietician and certified intuitive eating counselor, owner of Laura Iu Nutrition
Charlotte Markey, Psychology and health sciences professor at Rutgers University
We Recommend Book Riot: 10 Anti-Diet Books for the New Year “With an endless barrage of posts about becoming the dream version of yourself or sticking to a diet that promises unbelievable results in mere days, it’s an especially hard time for people who are trying to make peace with themselves and their relationships with food.”
The New York Times: Try Intuitive Eating to Break the Diet Cycle “Diets, because of their restrictive nature, impose an all-or-nothing mind-set that sets us up to fail. Breaking the rules of a diet typically leads to a new cycle of overeating, which in turn leads to yet another diet.”
Hell or High Seas tells the true story of sailors embarking on the adventure of a lifetime, as they brave the treacherous waters around Cape Horn, Chile. One of them is US Navy veteran who uses the expedition to share his own story, begin healing from his trauma and raise awareness about the millions of other veterans who need support returning to civilian life.
Guests Taylor Grieger, Navy Aviation Rescue Swimmer veteran and Captain
Stephen O’Shea, Author, filmmaker, and First Mate
Glenn Holsten, Documentary storyteller and director of Hell or High Seas
Ten years ago, Nick Clouse was riding shotgun in his friend’s Camaro in northern Indiana when the car jerked and he felt himself flying through the air. Clouse’s head slammed against the passenger side window.
The traumatic brain injury caused severe memory loss, headaches and insomnia. Clouse, who was 18 at the time, didn’t recognize his friends and family.
Shortly after the accident, his mother and stepfather petitioned to be his legal guardian, which meant they would be responsible for making all of his financial and health decisions. They said it would be temporary. A judge in Indiana made it official.
Years after recovering, Clouse wanted to make his own choices again — to put gas in his car, buy his daughter diapers and take his wife out for dinner without permission. But he ran into opposition. His parents didn’t want to give up their power, Clouse said in testimony before the U.S. Senate, and he had to find a way to fight for his rights.
“They had 100% control over my life, and I just didn’t have any say in what I did or anything,” Clouse told NPR in an interview.
If a judge determines an adult is unable to make responsible choices, the person can be placed under a court-appointed guardianship. The arrangement is known as a conservatorship in some states.
It’s a system that has come under scrutiny nationwide, after pop star Britney Spears sought to end her conservatorship. In September, in response to the Spears case, the U.S. Senate convened a committee hearing focused on the issue of guardianship reform. Clouse was invited to testify about his own experience.
Nick Clouse testifies before the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee in September during a hearing on reforming conservatorships or legal guardianships. (C-SPAN/Screenshot by NPR) Over time, Clouse testified, his traumatic brain injury improved. He started working as a welder, met his future wife — and got his parents’ permission to marry her. Clouse wanted out of the guardianship, but he said his parents resisted.
In January 2021, Clouse and his lawyer filed a petition to end the guardianship. According to court documents, his parents insisted on a psychological evaluation of Clouse’s decision-making ability. The evaluation determined guardianship was unnecessary and was dampening his ability to make independent decisions.
Eight months later, in August, Clouse’s parents agreed to end the guardianship.
People like Clouse under a legal guardianship face a Catch-22. To regain his independence, Clouse needed to speak with a lawyer and get legal advice. That required money, but his parents controlled his finances. Clouse eventually found pro bono legal representation through the advocacy group Indiana Disability Rights.
The lawyer representing Clouse’s mother and stepfather did not return multiple requests for comment.
A push to reform an inflexible system In recent years, there has been a growing shift toward less restrictive options that allow adults with physical or intellectual impairments more independence while providing them support for making decisions. Advocates for people with disabilities say the shift is long overdue — and some argue the system needs a complete overhaul.
“People with significant disabilities have long been discriminated against, because people think that they [lack] the ability to make decisions,” said Derek Nord, director of the Indiana Institute on Disability and Community.
While the disability rights movement in the U.S. has made huge strides on many issues, Nord said, additional reforms and better oversight are needed to protect people from exploitation.
Guardianship cases most often involve people with disabilities, the elderly, people recovering from an injury or a medical condition, and people with severe mental illness.
An official count does not exist, but the National Center for State Courts estimates about 1.3 million adults in the U.S. are in legal guardianships. In Indiana, where Clouse lives, 11,139 adults are in permanent guardianships, according to state officials.
In Indiana, entering a guardianship starts with filing a petition. The petitioner can submit evidence, like a doctor’s report, and appear in front of a judge, who then decides if the person in question is considered to be incapacitated.
The judge can establish limitations for the guardianship — although they rarely do, said Indiana Disability Rights attorney Justin Schrock, who represented Clouse.
“We’re talking about decisions about where to live, whether to get married, where to work, what medical care to receive, what to do with their money,” Schrock said. “They really do lose all of their most fundamental basic rights.”
Some guardianships are necessary, but advocates for reform argue they’re overused; most of the time people with disabilities can make choices for themselves — sometimes with guidance — and should maintain that right.
“Before I entered this field, I assumed that [entering a] guardianship was a fairly innocuous step,” Schrock said. “I also assumed that there were a lot of protections in place to prevent unnecessary guardianships from being established, which is absolutely not the case.”
Legal guardianships should not be the default for people who need help making decisions, said Kristin Hamre, assistant professor of social work at Indiana University, Bloomington. It’s in taking risks that people learn and grow as individuals — and restrictive legal arrangements like guardianships rob people of that opportunity.
“The right to risk is so important,” Hamre said. “Risk is where life happens, right? You begin walking, you might fall; you begin driving, you might crash.”
No easy way out of guardianship status Because of the way some state laws are written, guardianship cases often lack due process, said Robert Dinerstein, head of the Disability Rights Law Clinic at American University in Washington, D.C.
Many states’ guardianship laws ensure a right to legal counsel for people at risk of entering a guardianship. But that’s not the case in Indiana. The law allows petitioners — often a parent or family member — the option to present a consent form signed by the person under consideration for a guardianship, which deems them “incapacitated” and effectively waives their right to contest the hearing or even be present at it.
Indiana’s law also does not require petitioners to submit medical evidence to the court, although some courts have local rules requiring it.
“I’ve seen over and over again, these guardians’ attorneys will have the individual sign this consent form, file it along with a petition, oftentimes with no medical evidence,” Shrock said. “And some of these courts are just looking at that and saying, ‘OK,’ and then granting guardianship without ever having even laid eyes on this individual.”
Since guardianship cases take place in county-level courts, there’s tremendous variety in how these cases are handled. Larger counties with probate-specific courts can dedicate more time and resources to the hearings, while smaller county courts have a much larger breadth of cases, limiting a judge’s expertise in one area.
A task force formed to examine the use of legal guardianships in Indiana reported that no medical evidence of incapacity was presented in 1 in 5 guardianship cases in Indiana. The 2012 report also states that in cases where evidence was presented, the reports were often incomplete or illegible.
The burden of proof — to convince the judge the guardianship is unnecessary — tends to fall on the person with a disability, which differs from most other legal proceedings, Dinerstein said.
People at risk of entering guardianships should have the same right to a lawyer as people in criminal cases do, Dinerstein argues.
“I think the level of loss of liberty [in guardianship cases] makes a really strong case that there ought to be” a right to legal counsel, he said.
It matters because once a person is in a guardianship, it is extremely difficult to get out of it. Dinerstein notes there are cases in which all parties agreed the guardianship should end, but it still took years to finalize.
“It’s like Hotel California,” Dinerstein said. “Once a guardian is appointed, even if circumstances change where you no longer think you need it, it’s really hard to get courts to restore your capacity.”
Clouse is now 28 and lives in Huntington, Ind. Shortly after his guardianship was terminated in August 2021, he took his wife and daughter out for dinner — a decision that no longer required his parents’ approval. It was a small, but meaningful, luxury.
“I didn’t have to worry about my card getting declined … and bought my daughter a big piece of chocolate cake,” Clouse said. “That made me feel good that I could just kind of splurge a little bit.”
A growing call for less restrictive alternatives In 2019, Indiana joined a handful of other states — including Delaware, Texas, Ohio and Wisconsin — in passing laws to require judges to consider less restrictive alternatives to guardianships.
Supported decision-making is one of these alternatives. Adults in these arrangements consult a support team, made up of friends, family, social workers, case managers or paid support members, about big decisions in their lives. But, unlike in a guardianship, the individual can still make the final decision.
“Many of us … run important decisions by other people in our lives who are important to us — family, friends,” Dinerstein said. “[Then] you get to decide whether to listen to the advice.”
The year before the new law passed in Indiana, Jamie Beck became the first person in that state to transition from a legal guardianship into a supported decision-making arrangement — as part of a pilot program exploring less restrictive guardianship alternatives.
Beck has a mild intellectual and developmental disability and was placed in a guardianship at the age of 19 after her parents died. She spent a year in a nursing home, where she said she was bored and spent her time learning American Sign Language. Beck remained in the guardianship for eight years, even after demonstrating she could live independently and support herself financially.
Jamie Beck is now 31 and lives in an apartment in Muncie, Ind. “I get to do more things like a typical normal person would,” Beck said. (AJ Mast/WFYI) “She was just doing tremendously … and everyone felt she didn’t need a guardianship any longer,” said Judge Greg Horn, who terminated Beck’s guardianship. “It wasn’t like we were going to send her on her way and let her struggle with life’s challenges.”
To ensure she would be supported after the guardianship, the court worked with Beck to come up with a group of advisers she trusted to help her make decisions.
Beck said the supported decision-making agreement lets her have more say in her life. She’s now 31 and lives in an apartment in Muncie, Ind. She works as a housekeeper at a local hospital and spends her free time playing Pokemon Go.
“I get to do more things like a typical normal person would,” Beck said. She can seek medical care and travel out of town without needing anyone else to sign off on those decisions.
Despite new laws, enforcement lags At least 11 states and the District of Columbia have passed laws allowing for supported decision-making.
In Ohio, lawmakers passed reforms to close loopholes in the guardianship system after a 2014 investigation by The Columbus Dispatch revealed lawyers were becoming guardians for people with disabilities and charging attorney’s fees to perform basic duties, like shopping and cleaning. Today, the state requires guardians to undergo training and education and allows people under a guardianship to file complaints to the court.
But Kevin Truitt, legal advocacy director for Disability Rights Ohio, is skeptical that those reforms have led to major improvements for people with disabilities.
“Maybe some people have benefited from these reforms,” Truitt said. “But I worry not a lot has changed for many, many people across the state” because people under guardianship may not be aware of the new law’s provisions.
As part of the new law in Indiana, guardians are required to file reports every other year, documenting whether the guardianship remains necessary and whether less restrictive options have been considered.
The law also requires judges to document that less restrictive alternatives have been considered before full guardianships are approved.
But Schrock, the attorney with Indiana Disability Rights, said not much has changed on the ground, because of a lack of enforcement.
“I see … guardianship petitions that are still filed today that don’t even mention whether less restrictive alternatives have been assessed in any way,” Shrock said. “And that has been … a minimum requirement since July 1, 2019.”
Schrock said that even when reports are filed by guardians, they are rarely scrutinized by judges.
State officials in Indiana say they’re not tracking how many people are opting for supported decision-making agreements in lieu of legal guardianships. It’s hard to determine because these agreements can take place outside of a courtroom.
Kim Dodson, CEO of the Arc of Indiana, said she has only heard of a few cases where people are looking to revoke a guardianship.
“That’s not enough, right? We should have a lot more than that, especially two years after the implementation of supported decision-making,” Dodson said.
Dodson thinks the COVID-19 pandemic slowed the education campaign around supported decision-making, so judges and backed-up courts are behind on implementing the changes.
But she’s hopeful that over time, more people will understand the importance of ensuring people with disabilities are placed in the least restrictive arrangement possible.
“We really need to educate attorneys and judges, and make sure that they know about this new alternative, and that they get sold on it,” Dodson said. “And that just hasn’t happened to the extent that we’ve needed it to.”
This year, in the Indiana legislature session, Dodson’s organization will be advocating for additional guardianship reforms, such as requiring schools to educate parents of children with a disability on supported decision-making.
This story comes from Side Effects Public Media — a public health news initiative based at WFYI. Follow Carter on Twitter: @carter_barrett
Copyright 2022 Side Effects Public Media. To see more, visit Side Effects Public Media.
A devastating blaze in a Philadelphia rowhouse killed 12 people – eight of them children – on Wednesday morning. The city’s deputy fire commissioner has called it one of the worst fires he’s seen. So far, officials have said the duplex, owned by Philadelphia Housing Authority, had four non-functional battery-powered smoke detectors, and the investigation into the underlying causes is still underway.
We’ll start this hour with WHYY housing and community development reporter AARON MOSELLE, to discuss what we know about the fire so far, the lives lost and the families affected. Then, City Council President DARRELL CLARKE talks about the devastation and the impact on the city and the community. We’ll also talk about the individual and collective grief and trauma caused by the horrific tragedy and get insight and advice on healing with Drexel University psychiatrist KARRIEM SALAAM and Pennsylvania Hospital Chaplain REV. BRIAN DUNLOP.
Guests Aaron Moselle, WHYY housing and community development reporter @awmoselle
Darrell Clarke, President of City Council and represents Philadelphia’s 5th Council District @Darrell_Clarke
Karriem Salaam, adult and child & adolescent psychiatrist on the faculty of Drexel University College of Medicine and founding member of Global Health Psychiatry.
Rev. Brian Dunlop, Pennsylvania Hospital chaplain and a certified disaster chaplain
Recommended reading WHYY, ‘I feel broken’: 8 children among 12 people killed in Fairmount rowhouse fire – “I’ve been around for 35 years now, and this is probably one of the worst fires I’ve ever been to,” Deputy Fire Commissioner Craig Murphy said at the scene Wednesday morning. “I don’t have the words for how we’re feeling right now.”
Philadelphia Inquirer, Two sisters and their children are among the 12 who died in Philadelphia’s rowhouse fire
Billy Penn, How to help survivors of the devastating and tragic Fairmount house fire
This story is from The Pulse, a weekly health and science podcast.
Find it on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts.
Sarah Zobler found out about therapy apps in the most non-techy way possible: a billboard for Talkspace she spotted while driving through Reno, Nevada, where she lives.
“I knew therapy and I knew apps, but I had never even thought that such a thing existed,” Zobler said.
For Zobler, getting a therapist appointment in Reno was like pulling teeth. As a rabbi and a mother, it was hard to find time to commute to a therapist’s office. Apps offering virtual therapy, like Talkspace, claim to solve that problem.
They work like a matchmaking service. You download the app, give your therapist preferences, from gender to location, and the app will match you with therapists based on your preferences. Once you settle on a therapist, you can choose between plans allowing for video chat sessions or 24/7 text, video, or audio messaging. It’s like having a therapist in your pocket.
“I hit it off so well with the therapist on Talkspace that I stopped looking for an in-person therapist,” said Zobler. “I want my therapist to push and to be a sounding board, and she does that beautifully.”
However, Zobler’s therapist wasn’t the only thing drawing her to Talkspace. Since January 2021, Reno residents age 13 and up had free access to Talkspace for a year once they sign up.
The deal came together in December 2020. Reno’s mayor, Hillary Schieve, had actually been looking for a therapist for herself after the passing of both her brother and sister, only to find that appointments were all booked. She ended up using Talkspace instead.
At the same time, Reno was faced with a significant chunk of unused coronavirus relief money. Mayor Schieve decided to devote that money to mental health, entering talks with Talkspace and coming up with a plan: free Talkspace access for Reno residents age 13 and up. Residents had access to monthly video sessions and 24/7 video, audio or text messaging for a year.
Naturally, some residents who heard about the deal signed up right away.
“I suffer from depression that can get pretty severe at times, so therapy is a good supplement to my arsenal of normal mental health coping strategies,” said Sarah Richman. “I was actually in a position where I was looking for a new therapist because I had some funding barriers to my in-person talk therapy. So [the deal] was actually a very nice coincidence for me.”
The deal was great at reaching people like Zobler and Richman, who had used in-person therapy in the past. As for whether it was reaching communities that traditionally couldn’t afford in-person therapy, that was unclear. Several Reno Talkspace users said they were the only ones in their circle who even knew about the deal.
This story is from The Pulse, a weekly health and science podcast.
Find it on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts.
People go to therapy to talk about themselves mostly. But increasingly, politics is entering the therapist’s office as well.
Politics and current events have become a huge part of more people’s emotional lives, a big part of what makes them feel anxious, unsafe, or angry.
Minneapolis psychologist and trauma therapist Patrick Dougherty remembers a tense group therapy session in 2016. It was a men’s trauma therapy group, and the police killing of Philando Castile had just taken place a few miles from Dougherty’s practice. A white patient began to speak.
“And he went into a rage about the f— a— cops, and he was calling them like they were like Nazis, and he was just in this rage,” Dougherty said, “And everybody in the room was just like frozen, it’s like, `Holy shit, this guy is really big and he’s rageful.’”
Dougherty stopped him, asked him to reflect about his emotions — what the incident brought up for him specifically.
“He stopped for a minute, and his face changed and he dropped into his body. And then he started saying, ‘The f—- bullies, the f— bully a—. And tears came to his eyes and the whole room relaxed, because we knew he had been bullied. Severely bullied. It just slowed him down and opened up his heart, and then … he was in the room with us,” Dougherty said.
The idea that therapists are supposed to be a blank slate, leave their personal opinions outside, and sit back and listen? Dougherty stopped believing that years ago.
“You know, that’s just bunk,” he said. “That’s just a fantasy.”
The first time he decided to take a stance was the day after the shooting at a gay nightclub in Florida in which 49 people were murdered.
“And that morning, I just sat at my table and just wept, and … it was so clear to me that I have to bring this up because it was so disturbing,” he said.
Dougherty wrote an open letter and put it out in his waiting room. He doesn’t remember exactly what it said, but the gist of it was: We can talk about this. This shooting that happened to strangers in Florida may not seem relevant to why you’re coming into a therapist’s office in Minnesota, but it’s on the table for discussion.
“It was a clumsy attempt of saying, ‘You know, the world is in chaos, and it’s affecting most of us,” he said.
Dougherty’s basic philosophy became this: If the world is affecting your nervous system, ignore it at your peril.
Police shootings, the far right, terrorism, events in Washington or on the border, thousands of miles away, are affecting you in profound ways in your everyday life by way of affecting your emotional well-being.
“And so for most people, it’s just like, `Oh my gosh. Why hasn’t anybody told me this? Why isn’t this common dialogue?’” Dougherty said.
If the world is affecting us, he thinks we have to talk about it in the therapist’s office. That means diving into divisive issues. That means letting politics into the therapist’s office — an idea that was unthinkable for therapists only a generation ago.
These days, Dougherty is even upfront with clients about who he is politically.
“I’m a passionate liberal. And very open about that,” he said.
In fact, he believes therapists’ politics sometimes have to be obvious.
“I think people need ethical and courageous therapists. I think it’s ethically … an imperative, you have to do it,” he said.
But what happens when a politically upfront therapist meets a client with opposing opinions?
Dougherty described one who had come to him reluctantly — Christian counselors had failed the client, and he was coming out of his third failed marriage.
“So when it got hard with him, as when he came in and started really talking that demeaning stuff about immigrants or women or politics, this was the summer before Trump was elected,” Dougherty said.
He recalled almost losing his cool during a session with the client, actually a few times, and this particular instance when the client said something about women belonging in kitchens, old school sexist stuff.
“This is where the ethical place comes in, because I’m watching my own nervous system and how pissed off I was getting at this guy,” Dougherty said. “And he knew what was going on, he was saying things when he got stuck in therapy, he could throw something out to get me going because he knew because I was so clear about where I stood.”
Dougherty ended up calling out his client: “Hey, you gotta cool it with that stuff or we’re not gonna work.” The client listened, and kept seeing Dougherty for quite some time.
But the episode illustrates a contradiction in the mental health codes of ethics.
The therapy relationship
“We say in therapy all the time we want to accept who the client is,” said Mitchell Handelsman, a professor of psychology and ethics at the University of Colorado. “At the same time, we say you have to change the client, because that’s why they’re in therapy. There are all these inherent tensions in therapy, which is why therapy takes time to learn how to do.”
Handelsman said the point of ethical codes isn’t to tell you what to do, but instead how to think about problems.
Therapy is at heart a relationship, not a lecture or a scolding. But at the same time, some therapists, like Dougherty, feel an increasing responsibility to correct their patients’ opinions on, say, women or immigrants.
The ethics code doesn’t actually spell out what to do there, Handelsman said.
The vast majority of therapists, studies show, tend to be on the left politically. Mental health issues don’t discriminate, with people of all political stripes dealing with things such as depression and anxiety. So how do blue therapists make that connection with red clients who are very different from themselves?
Handelsman said this kind of problem isn’t entirely new.
“This controversy has existed for a long time in terms of religion, because there are more atheists among psychotherapists than among the general population. And the question then becomes: Can somebody who does not believe in God do therapy with somebody who does?” he said.
Nowadays, therapists are dealing with a political divide instead of a religious one.
“Part of what I think happened is that politics has become part of identity in a way that things like religion were,” said Bill Doherty, a family therapist in Minnesota and co-founder of Better Angels, a nonprofit that aims to bridge the left-right divide.
Doherty does a very specific type of therapy: He deals with family breakups and estrangements, “I’m never speaking to you again” sort of stuff.
In his field, there’s pre-Trump and post-Trump. Pre-Trump, these breaks were usually caused by some kind of interpersonal conflict —disparaging a partner, cheating, an argument that went too far. But, he said, after Donald Trump came into the political picture, it was different.
“I was confronted with people who had been married for a long time … where somebody was threatening divorce if their spouse voted for Trump. And so this, and then with family members cutting each other off, getting into Facebook wars and then defending not just on Facebook, but refusing to go to a Thanksgiving dinner,” Doherty said.
All of this boils down to one process, he said: polarization. The other guys aren’t just wrong about this issue or that, they’re 110% wrong — and they’re evil.
It’s easy to be distracted these days with the fast pace of life, the lure of multitasking and all the technology at our fingertips. We can post, text, email, call or watch anything anytime. But neuroscientist AMISHI JHA says that if we live with this scattered attention, we will miss out on 50% of our lives. Jha, a professor of psychology at the University of Miami, says that there are simple ways to regain our focus which can significantly improve our health and happiness. Jha joins us to talk about mindfulness, being in the moment and her new book, Peak Mind: Find Your Focus, Own Your Attention, Invest 12 Minutes a Day.
In Montgomery and Delaware counties, what do you wonder about the places, the people, and the culture that you want WHYY to explore?
After a pilot program showed promising results, Bucks County has expanded its Human Services Co-Responder program into the Falls and Middletown Township police departments.
The program pairs social workers or “co-responders” with police officers to help divert people away from the criminal justice system.
The social workers are expected to answer to cases mostly involving “aging, mental health, and substance abuse,” according to Bucks County officials.
Police usually arrive at the scene first, and once the situation is “deemed safe,” the officer will call a co-responder, officials said. From there, the officer “may leave and the co-responder can help connect those in need with social services.”
According to a report from Holy Family University, the co-responder pilot program in Bensalem, launched in December 2020, was successful in diverting community members from arrests and mental health holds.
During the first year, Bensalem police officers made 210 referrals to co-responders, with “almost all” of those individuals getting connected to a community resource, according to Bucks County Human Services Director Rachael Neff. Thirty-six percent of those resources were for mental health support, 9% were for homeless and mental health services, 16% were for youth mental health support.
Holidays are never quite the same after someone we love dies. Even small aspects of a birthday or a Christmas celebration — an empty seat at the dinner table, one less gift to buy or make — can serve as jarring reminders of how our lives have been forever changed. Although these realizations are hard to face, clinical psychologist Mary-Frances O’Connor says we shouldn’t avoid them or try to hide our feelings.
“Grief is a universal experience,” she notes, “and when we can connect, it is better.”
O’Connor, an associate professor of psychology at the University of Arizona, studies what happens in our brains when we experience grief. She says grieving is a form of learning — one that teaches us how to be in the world without someone we love in it. “The background is running all the time for people who are grieving, thinking about new habits and how they interact now.”
Adjusting to the fact that we’ll never again spend time with our loved ones can be painful. It takes time — and involves changes in the brain. “What we see in science is, if you have a grief experience and you have support so that you have a little bit of time to learn, and confidence from the people around you, that you will in fact adapt.”
O’Connor’s upcoming book, The Grieving Brain, explores what scientists know about how our minds grapple with the loss of a loved one.
Interview highlights On the grieving process
When we have the experience of being in a relationship, the sense of who we are is bound up with that other person. The word sibling, the word spouse implies two people. And so when the other person is gone, we suddenly have to learn a totally new set of rules to operate in the world. The “we” is as important as the “you” and “me,” and the brain, interestingly, really does encode it that way. So when people say “I feel like I’ve lost part of myself,” that is for a good reason. The brain also feels that way, as it were, and codes the “we” as much as the “you” and the “I.”
On the difference between grief and grieving
Grief is that emotional state that just knocks you off your feet and comes over you like a wave. Grieving necessarily has a time component to it. Grieving is what happens as we adapt to the fact that our loved one is gone, that we’re carrying the absence of them with us. And the reason that this distinction makes sense is, grief is a natural response to loss — so we’ll feel grief forever. A woman who lost her mother as a young person is going to experience that grief on her wedding day because it’s a new moment where she’s having a response to loss.
But “grieving” means that our relationship to that grief changes over time. So the first time, maybe even the first 100 times, you’re knocked off your feet with grief, it feels terrible and awful and unfamiliar. But maybe the 101st time, you think to yourself, “I hate this, I don’t want this to be true. But I do recognize it, and I do know that I will get through the wave.”
On the emotions involved in grieving
The range of emotions that someone experiences when they’re grieving is as long a list as the range of emotions we have in any relationship. Commonly there’s panic, there’s anxiety, there’s sadness, there’s yearning. But what we sometimes forget is that there’s also difficulty concentrating and confusion about what happens next.
I am often struck by the intensity of the emotions. Grief is like someone turned up the volume dial all of a sudden. The emotion that I think often interferes with our relationships and friendships when we’re grieving is anger, because the anger feels so intense. You have someone blow up at a dinner party and you think, “What’s happening with them?” And then to try and remember, “Oh, they’re grieving and everything is amped up a little bit.”
On what is happening in our brains
We have neuroimaging studies basically of grief, of the momentary reaction where you have that emotional yearning experience. There are less than a handful of studies looking at more than one moment in the same person across time — so looking at their grieving trajectory. What we know right now in these early days of the neurobiology of grief is really coming from snapshots.
Having said that, one of the things that we know is that grief is tied to all sorts of different brain functions we have, from being able to recall memories to taking the perspective of another person, to even things like regulating our heart rate and the experience of pain and suffering. So lots of different parts of the brain are orchestrating this experience that we have when we feel grief.
On prolonged grief
When you’re knocked over by that wave of grief, you want to know, “When will this end?” From a research perspective, there is a very small proportion of people who might have what we now call prolonged grief disorder, something we start looking for after six months or a year [after a death or loss]. … And what we are seeing, [in such cases], is that this person has not been able to function day to day the way that they wish that they could. They’re not getting out the door to work or getting dinner on the table for their kids or they’re not able to, say, listen to music because it’s just too upsetting. So these types of concerns … suggest it would be helpful to intervene and get them back on the healing trajectory where they will still feel grief, but they will adapt to it differently.
The older term that we were using for a long time was “complicated grief.” And although prolonged grief disorder is the term we’ve settled on, there’s a reason that I like the term complicated — because it makes you think of complications.
As an example, one of those is the grief-related rumination that people sometimes experience. The better term for that that people will recognize is the “would’ve, should’ve, could’ve” thoughts. And they just roll through your head over and over again. The problem with these thoughts — we sometimes call “counterfactuals” — is that they all end in this virtual scenario where the person doesn’t die. And that’s just not reality. And so, by spinning in these thoughts, not only is there no answer — there are an infinite number of possibilities with no actual answer of what would have happened — but it also isn’t necessarily helping us to adapt to the painful reality that they did die. And so our virtual version is not really helping us to learn how to be in the world now.
It’s less than 10% of people who experience prolonged grief disorder. And what that means is 90% of people experience difficult grief and suffering, but don’t have a disorder after losing a loved one. I think it’s so important to remember that … because we don’t want to hide grief away … in a psychiatrist’s office or a counselor’s office, except in indications where that would be helpful to get people back on track.
On how to support grieving people in your life
I think when you care for someone who is going through this terrible process of losing someone, it really is more about listening to them and seeing where they’re at in their learning than it is about trying to make them feel better. The point is not to cheer them up. The point is to be with them and let them know that you will be with them and that you can imagine a future for them where they’re not constantly being knocked over by the waves of grief.
On losing people to the pandemic
One of the topics I think is not much in the national conversation is that so many of the deaths of our loved ones happened in hospitals, emergency rooms and ICUs — and we weren’t there to see it. And that is for a very good reason, because we were trying to stop the spread of COVID. So having family members in hospitals did not make sense.
But it means that people are without these memories of watching their loved one become more ill and watching those changes that happen in their body that prepare our mind for the possibility that they might die. To go through that process without those memories makes it much harder to learn what has happened. So many people feel it hasn’t really sunk in yet that they’re gone.
What I don’t hear very often is the fact that with COVID, the loved ones that are left behind made the sacrifice of not being with their loved ones in the hospital in order to stop the spread. And that sacrifice needs to be recognized, I think. In part to help people heal, so that it’s understood why they’re having such a difficult time. And to elevate the understanding that they did something for the greater good — and they gave up something while they did it.
An excerpted audio version of this interview first appeared in a recent episode of NPR’s daily science podcast, Short Wave, hosted by Emily Kwong and produced by Berly McCoy.
Copyright 2021 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.
This story originally appeared on Love Now Media.
Hounding families for money was a soul-crushing way to make a living for Jon McKay, but his stint working with a collection agency gave him an idea. He would start an organization to help his community fix its finances.
“That’s how I was going to save the hood,” said McKay, 37, “by teaching financial literacy.”
McKay’s Life Outside the Streets group retained that mission until the entrepreneur with a stockpile of ideas, experienced another ‘Aha’ moment. But this one felt more like a thunderclap.
A workshop trainer was describing the effects of traumatic experiences on the brain. Distress from abuse, neglect, violence and poverty affects the functioning of the brain and makes it harder for reason to govern behavior. Research also shows that childhood trauma can be a contributor to the development of serious health conditions.
McKay was fascinated. At the root of so many community ills, McKay believes, is a physical condition that can be treated. He felt compelled to share what he had learned and vowed to change the mission of the organization he founded. Life Outside the Streets would focus on educating people about trauma and its effects on the brain so that they can recognize it and begin the healing process.
Since that day in 2016, McKay has preached a gospel of trauma-induced health and behavioral issues to anyone who would listen. His organization has led workshops promoting arts education to foster coping skills. McKay has spoken at community events and marched to protest the city’s violence. He’s partnered with other activists, including the creators of Philly Truce App, a device that helps its users mediate conflict.
“Stressers like poverty, violence, drug addiction – they damage your stress response system,” said McKay, whose first name Jon is pronounced Yon. “If we look at it like a medical condition and the person as a patient, the approach and tone will be different,” McKay said.
McKay carries that philosophy with him as he walks the halls of Vaux Big Picture High School in North Philadelphia and El Centro de Estudiantes high school in Frankford where he has worked as a full-time “climate manager” and mentor since September. He describes his duties as “discipline management,” and running detention, while also providing mentorship and support that creates a setting conducive to academic achievement and “success in life.”
Every firm, but friendly “Good Morning,” and brotherly handshake-hug, is an invitation to connect and engage with McKay. The single dad of two, whose home is not far from the schools, has custody of his daughter.
“He brings joy to his work and an unapologetic passion,” said Shavonne McMillan, principal of Vaux. “And he is a visionary. He always has an idea,” she said.
Jon McKay leading a workshop at Vaux Big Picture High School in North Philadelphia. Photo by Tezarah Wilkins
c latest is to train a of corps of student ambassadors who would serve as mediators to help de-escalate conflict amongst their peers. They would learn the science behind brain trauma, along with coping skills and self-care. The initiative is in the planning stages.
When families don’t get along or violence in the streets threatens loved ones, students can feel “upset” and “messed up,” but try not to let it show, said Rhyin Bradley, 15, a sophomore at Vaux.
Governor Phil Murphy’s recent nominees for the Pinelands Commission have been met with shock and confusion by NJ environmentalists for ties to chemical companies and political lobbying. Guest: Jon Hurdle, freelance environmental journalist and contributor to NJ Spotlight
Students recently protested a controversial Ecuadorian political figure who was invited to the University of Pennsylvania Penn as a visiting scholar. Guest: Sigal Ben-Porath, education professor and author of Free Speech on Campus
A grant for an interesting kind of therapy has been awarded to local hospitals to help ease the pandemic’s terrible toll on healthcare workers. Guests: Einstein Chief Nursing Officer AnnMarie Papa and music therapist Laura Thomae
We Recommend NJ Spotlight News: After Protests, Murphy Drops Pinelands Nominee “Montero was an unsuitable candidate because he works for the Chemistry Council, which ‘routinely’ opposes new regulations designed to protect human health and environmental quality from chemical contamination.”
The New York Times: M.I.T.’s Choice of Lecturer Ignited Criticism. So Did Its Decision to Cancel. “…professors drew an analogy between today’s climate on campus and Germany of the 1930s and warned of what happened when an ideological regime obsessed with race came to power and what it did to free thought.”
Isolation. Anxiety. Uncertainty. The stresses of the coronavirus pandemic have taken a toll on Americans of all ages, but a new poll finds that teens and young adults have faced some of the heaviest struggles as they come of age during a time of extreme turmoil.
Overall, more than a third of Americans ages 13 to 56 cite the pandemic as a major source of stress, and many say it has made certain parts of their lives harder. But when it comes to education, friendships and dating, the disruption has had a pronounced impact among Generation Z, according to a new survey from MTV Entertainment Group and The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research.
Among Americans in Gen Z — the survey included ages 13 to 24 — 46% said the pandemic has made it harder to pursue their education or career goals, compared with 36% of Millennials and 31% in Generation X. There was a similar gap when it came to dating and romantic relationships, with 40% of Gen Z saying it became harder.
Forty-five percent of Gen Z also reported greater difficulty maintaining good relationships with friends, compared with 39% of Gen X Americans. While many Millennials also said friendships were harder, Gen Z was less likely than Millennials to say the pandemic actually made that easier, 18% vs. 24%.
Roughly half of Americans across generations, including Gen Z, said the pandemic led to struggles having fun and maintaining mental health.
The findings are consistent with what health and education experts are seeing. After months of remote schooling and limited social interaction, teens and young adults are reporting higher rates of depression and anxiety. Many are also coping with academic setbacks suffered during online schooling.
The outsized impact on children and adolescents is partly linked to where they are in their brain development, said Dr. Cora Breuner, a pediatrician at Seattle Children’s Hospital. Those periods are when humans see the most growth in executive function — the complex mental skills needed to navigate daily life.
“It’s this perfect storm where you have isolated learning, decreased social interaction with peers, and parents who also are struggling with similar issues,” Breuner said. It means that, while young people are falling behind in school, they’re also behind on the skills needed to cope with stress and make decisions, she added.
For 16-year-old Ivy Enyenihi, just thinking about last school year is hard. While her parents continued working in person, she spent day after day alone at their home in Knoxville, Tennessee. Her high school’s online classes included live interaction with a teacher just two days a week, leaving her totally isolated most days.
“I’m a very social person, and so not having people around was probably what made it the hardest,” Enyenihi said. “It just made normal things hard to do. And it definitely made me depressed.”
When her 10-year-old daughter tried spraying air freshener on herself before school one morning, Brittany Tichenor-Cox suspected something was wrong with the sweet little girl whose beaming smile had gone dormant after she started the fifth grade.
She coaxed out of Isabella “Izzy” Tichenor that a boy in her class told her she stank after their teacher instructed the class that they needed to shower. It was the latest in a series of bullying episodes that targeted Izzy, who was autistic and the only Black student in class. Other incidents included harassment about her skin color, eyebrows and a beauty mark on her forehead, her mother said.
Tichenor-Cox informed the teacher, the school and the district about the bullying. She said nothing was done to improve the situation. Then on Nov. 6, at their home near Salt Lake City, Izzy died by suicide.
Her shocking death triggered an outpouring of anger about youth suicides, racism in the classroom and the treatment of children with autism — issues that have been highlighted by the nation’s racial reckoning and a renewed emphasis on student mental health during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Corruption charges against Johnny “Doc” Dougherty and City Councilman Bobby Henon have garnered national headlines since 2019, and WHYY Reporter MEIR RINDE has been in court covering their trial since it began in early October this year. He’ll join us to discuss major findings and if the jury’s decision could set a precedence for future cases. And, it’s no surprise the pandemic has negatively impacted mental health for kids, but experts say behavioral struggles, depression and anxiety are becoming more severe than ever – and showing up in patients as young as 4 years old. We’re joined by Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia Psychiatrist-in-Chief DR. TAMI BENTON to look at a national shortage of inpatient facilities for the most at-risk children, and how it’s impacting local families. We’re also one week away from the 2021 Philadelphia Marathon, which took a Covid-19 hiatus last year. Race Director and running coach KATHLEEN TITUS will share tips for first time runners and give us a look behind the scenes of the City’s 27th annual race.
It’s easy to be distracted these days with the fast pace of life, the lure of multitasking and all the technology at our fingertips. We can post, text, email, call or watch anything anytime. But neuroscientist AMISHI JHA says that if we live with this scattered attention, we will miss out on 50% of our lives. Jha, a professor of psychology at the University of Miami, says that there are simple ways to regain our focus which can significantly improve our health and happiness. Jha joins us to talk about mindfulness, being in the moment and her new book, Peak Mind: Find Your Focus, Own Your Attention, Invest 12 Minutes a Day.
This story is from The Pulse, a weekly health and science podcast.
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Shared experience and hardship often breed their own kind of humor: the inside jokes and expressions only people in the group will understand. As a civilian, Zachary Bell missed the camaraderie of the Marine Corps, and he was deeply upset by the amount of suffering he was seeing among his fellow veterans following deployments.
So he decided to draw on that shared humor to reach his fellow vets with positive messages, or just something that would make them smile. He took a piece of cardboard, a marker, and wrote, “Take Motrin, drink water, and change your socks.” The pandemic had just started to change life dramatically in the United States, and Bell thought this old and well-known military “medical” advice would make people laugh.
“It’s because it’s really literally what you’re told to do for anything, especially while you’re in the active service,” Bell said.
He posted a picture of himself holding the sign on Instagram, and “Veteran with a Sign” was born. The Instagram page now has close to 90,000 followers.
Bell said he chose simple cardboard signs as a way to communicate as a contrast to most other things people will see on Instagram. “Everything is filtered, screened, you know, colors are balanced. And I was really kind of thrown by this juxtaposition of low technology on a high-technology platform.”
But, he said, there’s more than immediately hits the eye.
“I think about it like an infographic. Like, there’s something I want to tell you. But it might not just be the words, it might be how I’m dressed or where I’m at. But you have to look at the picture, and I want the layers to be there.” He is typically pictured wearing a baseball cap backwards, a military green T-shirt that shows off his tattoos, and sunglasses.
A new study suggests that people who face discrimination at a young age are more likely to develop behavioral and mental health problems later in life.
And the risks may be cumulative; those who faced more incidents of discrimination had an even higher risk of future problems, researchers found.
The UCLA study, published in the journal Pediatrics on Sunday, looked at health data for 1,834 Americans who were between the ages of 18 and 28 when the study started. The authors said it was the first time researchers had probed the effects of discrimination on the same group of young people during their transition to adulthood.
“With 75% of all lifetime mental health disorders presenting by age 24, the transition to adulthood is a crucial time to prevent mental and behavioral health problems,” Yvonne Lei, a medical student at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA and the study’s corresponding author, said in a press release.
The data came from the University of Michigan’s Transition to Adulthood Supplement of the Panel Study of Income Dynamics survey, in which 93% of respondents reported experiencing discrimination. It included discrimination based on age, physical appearance, sex, race and other factors.
According to the UCLA researchers, people who faced any discrimination had a 26% greater risk of poor health than those who said they hadn’t faced any.
And young people who faced frequent discrimination, which was defined as at least a few times per month, saw a roughly 25% jump in their likelihood of being diagnosed with a mental illness over those who had faced little or no discrimination. They were also twice as likely to develop severe psychological stress.
The study also suggested a connection between the effects of discrimination on young people and the disparate levels of care they receive in the health care system.
“The associations we found are likely also intertwined with mental health care service disparities — including inequities in care access, provider biases and structural and institutional discrimination in health care — leading to inequities in diagnoses, treatment and outcomes,” said Dr. Adam Schickedanz, an assistant professor of pediatrics at the Geffen School of Medicine and the study’s senior author.
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