Former First Lady Rosalynn Carter is frustrated and angry. At a forum and panel conversation held on Monday, May 3, she insisted that our country's current mental health system is broken, despite the $120 billion dollars our federal government spends annually on direct mental health care.
Over the years, I have had the good fortune to work with journalists in Colombia, Guatemala and Mexico: countries where the media are under fire for the watchdog role they perform. I have been awed by their powerful commitment to the profession and to the public they serve despite great personal risk. I always departed wishing I could do more.
The 82nd annual Academy Awards are coming up on March 7, and one of the films in the running, nominated for six Oscars, is "Precious." It's the story of a 16-year-old African-American girl living in Harlem who suffers physical, sexual and emotional abuse and is pregnant by her own father. It's the first film directed by an African-American to ever be nominated for best picture. It's also the first film in a long time to bring the issue of child sexual abuse to the forefront of the Academy Awards ceremony and the American imagination.
The deadliest soldier-on-soldier incident among U.S. servicemembers since the beginning of the Iraq war occurred yesterday. Sgt. John M. Russell has been charged with five counts of murder and one count of aggravated assault after opening fire upon staff at a combat stress clinic at Camp Liberty, Iraq.
If there is one constant in the political history of Gaza over the 61 years since the Arab-Israeli war of 1948, it is that whenever it is thought that the situation can’t get any worse, it usually does. The Israeli-Hamas war that ended three months ago left many hundreds dead, thousands of others robbed of their livlihoods and the political divisions within Palestinian society just as deeply fissured as before.
Six journalism grad students working with ABC’s 20/20 spent the summer investigating the stories of soldiers who abuse drugs. In their TV report, soldiers speak to the students of going into war drug-free, but turning to cocaine, amphetamines, and prescription drugs to deal with their traumatic experiences.
After two packed days at the International Society for Traumatic Stress Studies conference, I was exhausted, even though I didn't make it the conference's liveliest evening session (see picture). But between meetings with Dart Center and Dart Society leaders on the third and final day, I still managed to sit in on several significant panels, all speaking directly to the interface between journalists and the traumatic human experiences they cover ...
After my last post, at the end of my first day at the International Society for Traumatic Stress Studies' annual conference, the ISTSS gave out their annual awards. Of particular note: the 2008 Frank Ochberg Award for Media and Trauma Study was given to the Dart Center's founding director, Roger Simpson, for his groundbreaking research work ...
Once a year, you can find the world's trauma experts, the Dart Center's staff and the journalists who won Dart's annual Ochberg Fellowships in one place: the annual meeting of the International Society for Traumatic Stress Studies. This year the place is Chicago, and while the fellows are bonding in their fourth day of seminars, I'm wandering in and out of panels learning about the cutting edge of trauma research from psychiatrists, psychologists, social workers, nurses, counselors, administrators, advocates, journalists, and even clergy. Today through Sunday, I'll be blogging their nuggets of wisdom here.
Journalists in Switzerland and Germany are talking about the case of Carl Just: a war reporter suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder who just sued his former employer. Just's lawsuit appears to be the first suit for work-related PTSD to be brought by a journalist against a European media company.