Despite years of campaigns and marketing, there is still a lot of stigma around mental health. This stigma is especially pronounced in communities of color and among people with constant financial stressors. All too often, many people see seeking help or getting help for themselves or their children as a sign of weakness. Sometimes, families are more comfortable with talking about addiction, behavioral problems, or even criminality rather than looking beneath the surface and

Former slave Frederick Douglass said, “It is easier to build stronger children than to repair broken men.” Douglass—the social reformer, abolitionist, orator, writer, and Lincoln’s friend and adviser—was right then, and he’s still right. With National Child Abuse Prevention Month and Sexual Assault Awareness Month both being observed in April, there may be no better time to recognize the urgency of these issues. Twenty years ago, the connection between early exposure to domes

Shondra Rhimes, creator of Gray’s Anatomy, Scandal, and How to Get Away with Murder, wrote a book called Year of Yes: How to Dance it Out, Stand in the Sun, and Be our Own Person. It is a wonderful book that recounts the year she decided to move out of her comfort zone and live in the “space of yes.” For her, “the space of yes” was a period of freeing herself from the “shoulds”, limits, and restrictions that she placed on her life. Her book is a feel-good, inspirational rea

Ntozake Shange, author of the famous choreopoem For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide/When the Rainbow is Enuf passed away this year on October 28. She was an award-winning playwright celebrated for telling women’s stories in women’s voices. In 2010 Tyler Perry transformed her trailblazing work into a movie. One of the monologues from the choreopoem is called “Somebody Almost Walked Off wid Alla My Stuff.” It’s about what happens when a woman gives/allows her “stuff’—