In Asian American families, where the subject of sex is particularly taboo and parents may lack sex education themselves, discussions about sex are less likely to happen. Reporter Thy Vo set out to document the consequences for young Asian Americans.
“He just gets mad. He gets really, really angry,” says Kecia Brighthaupt, referring to her 15-year-old son Jamari. “It would be a big difference in his behavior and certain things he does if his dad was more involved and hands on.”
Just before President Obama announced a new set of new initiatives to boost access to addiction treatment this week, a four-part series on NPR looked at the opioid epidemic's smallest victims, and what can be done to improve their care.
"It’s around 10 p.m. when I call a crisis worker for victims of domestic violence in remote Northern California," writes reporter Emily Cureton. "I’m panicking, 150 miles away in Oregon. I’m really afraid someone is going to get hurt tonight."
California’s jails were built to hold inmates for relatively short sentences — usually just a few months. But now local law enforcement is grappling with how to hold offenders for long periods of time, which is having an impact on mentally ill inmates.
In rural California, the state says the solutions to domestic violence require a cultural shift, that entire communities must take responsibility for ending violence against women. Now, new programs on the ancestral lands of the Yurok Tribe are trying to do that.
Domestic violence breeds shame and fear, which often keeps the abused from seeking help. Shame and fear also feed family and social dysfunction, and violence can become a normal part of life, a curse that gets passed down from generation to generation.
Why is mental health so walled off from the rest of the health care system, even when statistics show that 18 percent of all adults have some kind of mental illness? And weren't federal parity requirements supposed to fix this?
Tracking domestic violence is difficult; more so in rural areas. But in California’s Del Norte County, these calls come into law enforcement agencies at a rate two-and-a-half times that of anywhere else in the state.
Just because a medical board takes action, it doesn’t mean that the action is adequate. Consider the case of Dr. Reinaldo de los Heros, a Maine psychiatrist who columnist William Heisel first wrote about back in 2010.
