If anyone knows how mental illness can land someone in the criminal justice system, it’s Dianna Branch, the mother of a severely mentally ill adult son. She says his illness — and the drug use he believes eases his symptoms — has caused him to start fights, total seven cars and vandalize property.
If you're pitching a story that’s going to take you off deck for dailies, it helps to have two things: a great character and a clear wrongdoer. When I decided to look into a shortage of residential addiction treatment facilities in California’s Imperial County, I thought I had those ironed out.
The Cleveland Plain Dealer’s Brie Zeltner and Rachel Dissel are putting the issue of lead poisoning in children back on the map, publishing a deeply reported series of stories on the issue this week. The ambitious project is worth a closer look.
In the fields of Calif.'s Ventura County, some workers only speak Mixteco. The cultural and language barriers make it difficult for them to access health care. Reporter Julio Vaqueiro Borbolla tells the story of how he went about the difficult task of gaining their trust and telling their stories.
As a journalist, both homelessness and mental illness are uniquely challenging topics to report on. When combined, the reporting challenges double, but so do the potential insights. Claudia Boyd-Barrett shares lessons from her experience reporting on the issue in California's Ventura County.
The idea that childhood trauma and adversity can become embedded in the body and shape one's health decades later is not new. But a recent study throws the idea into stark relief: Even when psychological distress disappears by adulthood, the elevated risk of chronic disease remains.
In a town whose problems already include air pollution, water contamination and poverty, the California drought has spurred a growing health crisis, worsening respiratory conditions and burdening those with other illnesses, such as 49-year-old Manuel León.
In the third installment of the San Diego 6 News series “Mind Your Health,” Neda Iranpour looks into a place many of us spend a lot of our time: at work. Iranpour profiles Dr. Bronner’s, a socially-conscious soap-maker to find out why offering free wellness and health care to employees pays off.
During my fellowship project, I chose to focus on the impact of historical trauma and unresolved grief on the lives of Native peoples and ways that they are healing from the trauma and building resiliency. Here's what I learned along the way.
While we may think doctors and medical students don’t have time to “sit still,” UC San Diego is finding that the act of meditating is helping create better medical professionals. The school's Center for Mindfulness is now serving as an example to many universities and hospitals.
