GBO NEWS: 2 Views of Trauma (Preventing & Surviving); GBONews/JNG to Turn 25 at ASA Fete; Reporting Fellowships; Leland’s NYT Bestseller; AgeLab’s Coughlin at Aging 2.0; & MORE
GENERATIONS BEAT ONLINE NEWS
E-News of the Journalists Network on Generations — Our 25th Year.
February 23, 2018 — Volume 18, Number 3
EDITOR’S NOTE: GBONews, e-news of the Journalists Network on Generations (JNG), publishes alerts for journalists, producers and authors covering generational issues. Send your news of important stories or books (by you and others), fellowships, awards or pertinent kvetches to GBO News Editor Paul Kleyman. To subscribe to GBONews.org at no charge, simply sending a request to Paul with your name, address, phone number and editorial affiliation or note that you freelance. For each issue, you’ll receive the table of contents in an e-mail, so just click through to the full issue at www.gbonews.org. GBONews does not provide its list to other entities.
In This Issue: Join the NPA (National Plowshares Association)! Complimentary Membership Card No. 1 to Wayne LaPierre.
1. THE BOOKMOBILE: Two Takes on Trauma—Before and After– *** Dr. Nadine Burke Harris on Lifelong Impact of Childhood Adversity; ***Mark Miller’s Jolt: Stories of Trauma and Transformation.
2 . EYES ON THE PRIZE: *** Economics of Aging and Work Journalism Fellowship application deadline April 2 by the Associated Press-NORC Center; REMINDERS: *** Columbia University’s 2018 Aging Fellowship deadline, March 2: *** Rosalyn Carter Journalist Fellowship in Mental Health, April 11.
3. GEN BEATLES NEWS: *** ASA’s Aging in America Conference, March 26-29, Marks 25th Anniversary of Journalists Network on Generations & GBONews; *** John Leland Hits NYT Bestsellers List With Happiness Is a Choice You Make: Lessons from A Year Among the Oldest Old; *** MIT AgeLab Founder/CEO Joseph Coughlin Featured at Aging 2.0 in Boston, March 1, in On-Stage Talk with Boston Globe’s Robert Weisman on Coughlin’s new book, The Longevity Economy; *** Journalist and MemoryWell Founder Jay Newton-Small on Her Week in Assisted Living in PBS Next Avenue Story.
*** “Advance Care Directives: Making Plans for Future Medical Care,” by Larry Beresford, The Lancet’s “United States of Health US” blog;
*** “Minnesota Senior Community Pushes Back Against ‘Astronomical’ Rent Hikes,” by Chris Serres, Minneapolis Star-Tribune;
*** “Chinese Seniors in New York: Where to Live,” by Zhihong Li, in English see Diverse Elders Coalition, in Chinese see Sing Tao Daily;
*** “A Gift From My Grandmother: An Embrace of Life — and Aging,” by Jeneé Darden, KQED Public Broadcasting;
*** “Hmong Elders and Depression,” by Alice Daniel, Txhaub.com (California Hmong media) and Diverse Elders Coalition;
*** “Home Care Agencies Often Wrongly Deny Medicare Help to the Chronically Ill” by Susan Jaffe, Kaiser Health News.
1. THE BOOKMOBILE
*** Two Takes on Trauma—Before and After: It’s tempting to want to joke about a typical day in the White House, but in some ways the current trauma-ridden social and political atmosphere in our country—will there have been only 18 school shootings within our shores before you read this?—also may well prompt us to a deeper reflection not only on our culture of cruelty, but our pathways to healing and even for some, thriving.
Two important new books by pediatrician Nadine Burke Harris, MD, and journalist Mark Miller dive deeply into the long-term effects of traumatic experience, both in the damage and the redemption that is possible across the years.
*** In her groundbreaking new book, The Deepest Well: Healing the Long-Term Effects of Childhood Adversity (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt), Nadine Burke Harris, MD, MPH, writes, “Twenty years of medical research has shown that childhood adversity literally gets under our skin, changing people in ways that can endure in their bodies for decades. It can help tip a child’s developmental trajectory and affect physiology. It can trigger chronic inflammation and hormonal changes that can last a lifetime. It can alter the way DNA is read and how cells replicate, and it can dramatically increase the risk for heart disease, stroke, cancer diabetes—and Alzheimer’s.”
Soon after Burke Harris founded the Center for Youth Wellness, a free clinic in San Francisco’s largely African American Bayview-Hunter’s Point district about a decade ago, she began noticing a pattern of poor health effects, such as stunted development, not easily explained by medical factors. Eventually her quiet health-history inquiries revealed children who had been afflicted by abuse, neglect, parental addiction, mental illness and other kinds of physical and emotional assaults.
Burke Harris’ has been on tour and her upcoming schedule has her at the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco, March 27; the Westminster Town Hall Forum, in Minneapolis, April 10; and the 92nd Street Y in New York City, June 6; all with more to come.
A colleague introduced her to the landmark 1998 Adverse Childhood Experiences, or ACE Study by Kaiser Permanente and the Center for Disease Control of more than 17,000 adult patients. The Deepest Well compellingly describes Burke Harris’ journey in undertaking her own research into how–and how invasively–childhood trauma can become debilitating in unaddressed throughout one’s lifetime. The media contact for her at her Center is marketing@centerforyouthwellness.org.
And here’s the link to her powerful 15-minute TED Talk.
*** Also arriving on the GBONews bookshelf in February is Mark Miller’s new book, Jolt: Stories of Trauma and Transformation (Post Hill Press). Miller, a columnist on retirement for Reuters and contributor to the New York Times “Retiring” column, explores how many have found new purpose in their lives—sometimes dramatically, but also often in subtle, personal ways—following jarring events. Some of the stories he tells are horrific—coping in the wake of a mass shooting, or the abduction of a child, or the killing of a daughter doing peace work in Gaza. Others tell of overcoming debilitating but less dramatic events, such as the middle class professional mother, who found herself suddenly divorced, destitute and diagnosed with breast cancer and who pulled herself out of despair by founding a nonprofit to help other women in dire circumstances.
Miller’s slender but potent volume tells numerous, often gripping stories of survivors who would become nonprofit heroes—people like Chicago electrical utility troubleshooter Dave Schury. He was badly burned in a freak accident and eventually founded a peer-support training program enabling burn survivors to offer hope to those newly stricken while they’re still hospitalized.
Also, Miller tells of people like Hanh Meyers, an attorney and recent mother, who found herself newly widowed due to her husband’s cancer and, in reckoning with life’s fragility, left the “reasonable and safe” security of her legal career. Meyers, brought to the U.S. in infancy as a Cambodian refugee, conceded she was stepping out of the comfort zone of “seeing a particular future—thinking that you’ll go to work, raise a family, save for retirement, and visit with your grandchildren.” Determined to take up writing, while giving her 401(k) and job certainties for an effort that “might utterly fail,” she goes on, “Now, I can’t see a future, and that is unsettling. But I also feel willing to accept life on whatever terms it is offering me.”
In seeking her own way, Meyers is among those who followed a pattern Miller says he noticed over time: “Many (not all, certainly) of the people making these changes were spurred to do this after something very traumatic occurred, disrupting their sense of identity and values and forcing them to re-examine how they wanted to live their lives.”
Throughout the book, some Miller meets along the way experience “post-traumatic growth,” a reflective advancement toward new meaning in their lives. Some don’t. Some survive to find redemption in new purpose for others, others are grateful to have prevailed, but they also question whether our culture doesn’t tend too much toward judgmentalism toward those who don’t actualize their “inner hero” to change the world.
By its final pages, Jolt accomplishes that rare feat of being and easy read that also represents the human condition with honesty, depth and purpose.
Reporters can request a review copy from Devon Brown, Post Hill Press, 615-261-4646 ext. 104; email devon@posthillpress.com.
2. EYES ON THE PRIZE
*** Economics of Aging and Work Journalism Fellowship application deadline is April 2. This is a big one, offered by the Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research. Since it started four years ago, the focus has been on the economics of aging and work in the United States. One reporter will be selected to live and work in Chicago for the 10-month fellowship period. The fellow will work to develop the analytical research skills needed to create a series of news reports dealing with the economics of the aging workforce in the United States. Resulting stories will be distributed by AP to its global worldwide audience.
Applicants must have at least five years of experience, including those working in text, radio, television, and online. According to the website, “Approximately 40 percent of your time will be devoted to education and skill development activities, including formal and informal training in economics and social science research methods to facilitate data-driven journalism. The other 60 percent of your time will be spent developing in-depth reporting projects where you will obtain hands-on experience with the assistance of AP, NORC and University of Chicago senior staff.”
The fellowship will begin this September. Also, applicants “must be willing to relocate to Chicago. Consideration may be given to a highly qualified fellow who wishes to work in Washington, DC, instead of Chicago. Relocation support is available. NORC will provide office space on the University of Chicago campus.”
The current fellow is Maria Ines Zamudio, former bilingual investigative reporter for the Memphis Commercial Appeal Newspaper and also NPR’s Latino USA. Previous Fellows were Adam Allington of public radio’s Marketplace, and the AP’s own longtime generations-beat reporter, Matt Sedensky. The program is supported by grants from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. Details are at their website.
*** REMINDERS: Other Fellowship Application Deadlines:
* Columbia University’s 2018 Age Boom Deadline, Fri., March 2: The Robert N. Butler Columbia Aging Center and the Columbia School of Journalism are accepting applications for their annual Age Boom Academy fellowships. The program will bring about 20 journalists to New York City, May 31-June 2–all expenses paid. This year’s main theme is “The Future of Work: New Technology and an Aging Workforce.” Journalists should apply by Friday, March 2. The Age Boom Academy is funded by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. Contact Caitie Adams at ca2700@columbia.edu with questions.
* The Rosalyn Carter Journalist Fellowship in Mental Health program is accepting applications until April 11: Eight U.S. fellows will be awarded $10,000 each, plus two expense-paid visits to The Carter Center in Atlanta, Ga.
3. GEN BEATLES NEWS
*** Generations Beat reporters planning to attend the ASA’s Aging in America Conference in San Francisco, March 26-29, are invited to join GBONews Editor Paul Kleyman for a no-host dinner on Tues., March 27. Let me know if you plan to join us at pfkleyman@gmail.com. This conference will mark Journalists Network on Aging’s (and GBONews’) 25th anniversary, since a group of reporters founded it during ASA’s 1993 annual meeting.
To attend the conference, Generations beatles can apply for a complimentary media access pass at the conference home page. (Scroll to the bottom of that page.) This major meeting will include 3,000 professionals in aging and present hundreds of sessions on a wide range of topics in aging, a veritable supermarket of stories and sources. Can you eat. Let me know, and I’ll make the reservation at a favorite spot of ours near the San Francisco Hilton, where the conference is being held.
*** John Leland’s New Book, Happiness Is a Choice You Make: Lessons from A Year Among the Oldest Old (Sarah Crichton Books/Farrar, Straus, Giroux) sprang up to No. 11 on the New York Times bestsellers list following his stint on NPR’s “Fresh Air” with Terry Gross, Jan. 24. He’ll be in San Francisco, Monday, April 16, as the Monday evening-series speaker at the Institute on Aging. Bay Area reporters interested in connecting with him can contact the Institute’s Caitlin Morgan, cmorgan@ioaging.org. (For a media review copy and information on Leland’s other appearances, contact Caroline Zavakos: caroline.zavakos@fsgbooks.com; phone: 212-206-5227.)
Meanwhile, Leland, also author of 2005’s Hip: The History, was back to his young tricks with his profile, “Lin-Manuel Miranda, the Next Lion of New York,” in the NYT, Feb. 18. His dad, Luis Miranda provides the story’s intergenerational hipness.
*** MIT AgeLab Founder/CEO Joseph Coughlin, PhD, will be interviewed on-stage by the Boston Globe’s Baby Boomers and Life After 50 Reporter Robert Weisman, to keynote the Aging 2.0 conference in Boston, March 1. It will be a book signing event for Coughlin’s terrific new volume, The Longevity Economy: Unlocking the World’s Fastest-Growing, Most Misunderstood Market (Public Affairs/Hachette Group). The book, which GBONews mentioned in January, is a gem. Although it’s ostensibly about the relationship between technology and business, the book really is about how emerging systems could help build a better old age for everyone — always with the human touch at the core of Coughlin’s analysis. For press access to the conference contact Cynthia Stephens.
In the book, Coughlin calls for a new “longevity narrative” to replace the dysfunctional old negative framing of old age, including the budget-obsessed attack on Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. The Longevity Economy also challenges the prevailing liberal narrative that tends to reinforce the polarizing images of older adults as either poor, sick and needy, or as affluent, healthy and needing less public support.
Instead, Coughlin provides a strong and positive narrative of a more enabled older populations, certainly with better support for those in need, but also enhanced by both innovative technologies and human interfaces to make aging a pleasure, not a matter of trepidation. Not incidentally, Coughlin is also a very entertaining storyteller, often quite funny. For a review copy (hard copy of e-version), and press information, journalists can contact Jaime Leifer, at 212-364-0684; jaime.leifer@hbgusa.com.
*** “What It’s Like to Live in a Dementia Care Unit,” by Jay Newton-Small, Next Avenue (Feb. 6): Newton-Small, a former political reporter at Time Magazine, heads the startup company, MemoryWell, a platform for families to tell the life stories of institutionalized loved ones who are memory impaired. One aim is to foster a more sympathetic and engaged connection between the older residents and caregiving staff members. Newton-Small created an iPad-compatible format that families can use, working with a writer from MemoryWell’s roster of freelance reporters, to tell each elder’s story in words and pictures.
In this Next Avenue piece, Newton-Small explains that she took the opportunity to immerse herself for a week living in a locked dementia unit at Brookdale Senior Living’s Fort Collins, Colo., community, as part of Brookdale’s Entrepreneur-in-Residence program. She writes, “Brookdale’s objective is to give entrepreneurs the opportunity to test drive their products in a care setting, getting feedback from residents, families and staff. But for me, the experience was also a personal one: My father spent the last four years of his life living in locked dementia units. I had visited him plenty, but always wanted to know what his experience had felt like. This was my chance.”
4. THE STORYBOARD
*** “Advance Care Directives: Making Plans for Future Medical Care,” by Larry Beresford, The Lancet’s “United States of Health US” blog (Feb. 2): He writes, “But despite fears about the medical juggernaut of unnecessary, unbeneficial or futile invasive treatments at the end of life, most people don’t bother to complete advance care documents. The subject is off-putting, the legal language can be intimidating, and it’s just hard to imagine what kind of medical care one might want in some unspecified, distant future scenario.
Beresford, an Oakland, Calif., based health writer, features Iris Plans based in Austin, Texas. The advance-care planning service applies a remote videoconferencing app “using trained health professionals to facilitate meaningful conversations with the patient and as many loved ones as care to log onto a video conference call.” The process is HIPAA-compliant and usually takes two to three sessions of 40 to 60 minutes each. He writes, “The end result of this process typically includes a legally valid advance directive and an online archive of the patient’s wishes and fears, preserved on video for future reference.”
Beresford’s piece also looks at other tech approaches , such as one developed at Oregon Health Sciences University to help medical personal quickly access a patient’s legal document called physician orders for life-sustaining treatment (POLST),stating their basic end-of-life wishes.
If you don’t know about this Lancet blog section, it includes 14 topnotch health and health policy writer, such as Vin Gupta, a fellow in Pulmonary & Critical Care Medicine at Brigham & Women’s Hospital in Boston, and Susan Jaffe, The Lancet’s Washington correspondent and a regular writer for Kaiser Health News. To find Beresford’s recent stories, including the one mentioned here, simply go to the blog and scroll down a bit. (The writers are not shown alphabetically.)
*** “Minnesota Senior Community Pushes Back Against ‘Astronomical’ Rent Hikes,” by Chris Serres, Minneapolis Star-Tribune (Feb. 11): Serres digs into the pervasive role of private equity firms buying up long-term care facilities: “With the aging population and light regulation, the assisted-living industry has also become a magnet for Wall Street and private equity investment funds, which aim to maximize profits while, coincidentally, making it difficult for seniors to identify exactly who is raising their rents. In a sign of Wall Street’s growing interest, the giant private equity firm Blackstone Group last year formed a joint venture with the nation’s largest assisted-living operator, Brookdale Senior Living, acquiring a portfolio of 64 senior communities (nearly 6,000 units) for $1.1 billion.”
Serres’ investigation partly focuses on Autumn Glen in Coon Rapids, Minn., where “the facility’s owner announced steep rent increases that are uprooting residents and rending longtime friendships. Dozens of elderly residents, including many with disabilities and serious ailments, received notice late last year that their rent would increase by $300 to $500 a month, or 15 to 30 percent. . . . When they asked for an explanation, the residents encountered a complicated web of private investors, limited-liability partnerships and a nonprofit management entity, which, they say, have all ignored requests for a meeting.”
Reporters in this year’s Journalists in Aging Fellowship program recently posted the following stories. This program is the collaboration between the Gerontological Society of America and GBONews.org parent group, the Journalists Network on Generations. We’re grateful for the support of the following nonprofit partners: Silver Century Foundation, AARP, Commonwealth Fund, Retirement Research Foundation, and the John A. Hartford Foundation. Here are the stories:
- “Chinese Seniors in New York: Where to Live,” by Zhihong Li, Diverse Elders Coalition, Feb. 21, 2018. (Read the original article in Chinese at Sing Tao Daily, click here. Zhihong “Cecilia” Li writes, “New York City’s aging Chinese population is increasing rapidly as affordable housing has become more rare. To solve this problem, some local elected officials ask the city to approve the building of more affordable housing.” Also, “An immigrant from China, Aunt Lee, now nearly 91, said many in New York’s Chinese community were unwilling to move so far from Chinatown then, but today it is extremely difficult to find an empty affordable apartment for seniors there. Because of age, income, language barriers, immigrant status and other issues, some Chinese seniors who already live in an apartment may face more problems and even discriminations than other people.”
- “A Gift From My Grandmother: An Embrace of Life — and Aging,” by Jeneé Darden, KQED Public Broadcasting (Jan. 24, 2018) and Diverse Elders Coalition: Recent studies in the research journal, The Gerontologist, and others regarding race, culture and aging evaluated participants’ expectations about growing older. One found, “African American participants had the highest overall age-expectations.” Despite their more positive attitudes toward aging, black seniors still face social hardships, including ageism, racism, health problems, poverty and hunger.
- “Hmong Elders and Depression,” by Alice Daniel, Txhaub.com (California Hmong media, Jan. 16, 2018): When Yong Yang Xiong, 68, arrived in Fresno 14 years ago, he couldn’t speak English–and employers told him he was too old. For six years he’d helped the CIA fight its secret war in Laos. What helps Yong the most, he said, is attending a program at the Fresno Center for New Americans called Living Well or Kaj Siab. For the past decade, the center has offered culturally sensitive mental health services for hundreds of Southeast Asian refugees with depression. Also see the Diverse Elders Coalition, Feb. 13.
- “Home Care Agencies Often Wrongly Deny Medicare Help to the Chronically Ill” by Susan Jaffe, Kaiser Health News, Jan. 18, 2018: Colin Campbell, who has Lou Gehrig’s disease, spends $4,000 a month on home health care even though Medicare will cover the cost. The former computer systems manager was wrongly told the federal program would not cover home care by 14 providers. According to advocates for seniors and the home care industry, incentives intended to combat fraud and reward high quality care are driving some home health agencies to avoid taking on long-term patients, such as Campbell, who have debilitating conditions that won’t get better. Rule changes that took effect this month could make the problem worse. Also, NPR News, Jan. 17, 2018.
The Journalists Network on Generations (JNG), founded in 1993, publishes Generations Beat Online News (GBONews.org). JNG provides information and networking opportunities for journalists covering generational issues, but not those representing services, products or lobbying agendas. Copyright 2018 JNG. For more information contact GBO Editor Paul Kleyman.
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