How the ancient art of writing therapy can help you create a brighter future

The use of writing as therapy dates back millenniums. (Petro Feketa)

By Perry Garfinkel

Los Angeles Times

British author Graham Greene, in his 1980 book, "Ways of Escape," put into words what most writers know: "Writing is a form of therapy; sometimes I wonder how all those who do not write, compose or paint can manage to escape the madness, melancholia, the panic and fear which is inherent in a human situation."

Academicians trace the idea of writing as therapy to the time of Egyptian pharaoh Ramses II, about 1,200 BC. The entrance to his royal library declared: "House of Healing for the Soul." American Unitarian minister Samuel Crothers coined the term "bibliotherapy" in 1916. In the late 1980s, James Pennebaker, psychology professor at the University of Texas at Austin, led the modern writing therapy movement in a landmark research study that showed the potential health benefits of "expressive writing" about emotional upheaval.

In the last two decades, writing therapy has joined dance and art therapy as a legitimate therapeutic tool. And that has triggered growing interest in a type of writing that focuses on the healing power of putting feelings down on paper or screen — as evidenced by the burgeoning popularity of the memoir, as well as the use of journaling in businesses and American schools.

"We see writing as such a valuable vehicle to help students achieve deeper, richer self-insight," says Greta Vollmer, former director of UC Berkeley's Bay Area Writing Project, a 40-year-old program for teachers who teach writing in kindergarten through 12th grade. "We find youngsters can write their way to solutions, to a kind of inner peace and self-understanding."

Heartfelt prose

"So many people carry their secret stories of shame for years and years in their bodies, not just in their minds," says Nancy Aronie, the author of "Writing From the Heart." She leads workshops at Esalen in Big Sur and other locations. "But they feel lighter — less emotionally burdened — when they can literally let them out by putting them on paper or screen."

As evidence of her process' therapeutic value, among many examples, she recounts the story of an 83-year-old retired Episcopal priest who disowned his daughter when she announced she was a lesbian. "As he read his account to our group, he broke down crying," recalls Aronie. "He realized how wrong he was and said, 'Who am I that I could I have lost my daughter over such small-mindedness?' It was gorgeous." His breakthrough led to a reconciliation with his daughter, Aronie says.

For her own therapy, Aronie is writing a book about her son Dan, who died in 2010 from complications from multiple sclerosis at age 38. "I'd started it two years before he died. It helped me understand how his illness had held me hostage for so long. Those insights helped change our entire relationship."

Therapeutic value

A 2013 study showed that blogging has therapeutic value for teenagers experiencing social and emotional difficulties. So why not apply that notion to teens facing perhaps the most difficult writing assignment of their young lives: the college application essay?

"High school seniors come to me with so much fear about this," says Craig Heller, an Emmy-winning writer in Woodland Hills who tutors students preparing their college essays. "By and large, the majority disdain writing and are not self-reflective at that age."

Yet the prompts from colleges ask them to dig deep, in words. Stanford University, for example, famously asks: "What matters to you and why?" Another college: "Pick an experience from your own life and explain how it has influenced your development."

Heller encourages students by saying, "Writing this essay is an opportunity for you to explore what you didn't know you didn't know about yourself." He finds that patience and perseverance help him help them use this process to gain greater insight into themselves and their motivations.

"I recently worked with a student who had extremely low self-esteem," recalls Heller. "Developing and writing his college essays put him in touch with his positive qualities, which bolstered his confidence both socially and academically. The more drafts he wrote, the more he realized he was a unique person with uncommon skills and interests."

Here are some contacts for writing therapy.

"Writing from the Heart" workshops, http://chilmarkwritingworkshop.com

Craig Heller's college essay progam, www.collegeessaysolutions.com

health@latimes.com

Garfinkel, author of "Travel Writing for Profit and Pleasure," will lead a writing retreat in Baja California at Costa Baja Resort April 14-19.

Why don't black and white Americans live together?

On the east - and poorer side - of Troost Avenue in Kansas City, the city's racial dividing line

By Rajini Vaidyanathan - BBC News

Legal segregation in the US may have ended more than 50 years ago. But in many parts of the country, Americans of different races aren't neighbours - they don't go to the same schools, they don't shop at the same stores, and they don't always have access to the same services.

In 2016 the issue of race will remain high on the agenda in the United States. The police killings of unarmed black men and women over the past few years reignited a debate over race relations in America, and the reverberations will be felt in the upcoming presidential election and beyond.

Ferguson, Baltimore and Chicago are three cities synonymous with racial tensions - but all three have another common denominator. They, like many other American cities, are still very segregated.

In my reporting across the United States I've seen this first hand - from Louisiana to Kansas, Alabama to Wisconsin, Georgia to Nebraska. In so many of these places people of other races simply don't mix, not through choice but circumstance. And if there's no interaction between races, it's harder for conversations on how to solve race problems to even begin.

Newly released census data, analysed by the Brookings Institution, shows black-white segregation is modestly declining in large cities, but it remains high. If zero is a measure for perfect integration and 100 is complete segregation, analysis from Brookings showed most of the country's largest metropolitan areas have segregation levels of between 50 to 70.

According to the Brookings report, "more than half of blacks would need to move to achieve complete integration".

Some have pointed out that the wording of this part of the report itself highlights the challenges in these issues - why can't this be measured in the number of whites who would have to move?

Racial and socioeconomic segregation are closely linked - if you're a black person in America, you're more likely than a white person to live in an area of concentrated poverty.

This isn't simply a matter of choice, or chance. Some of it is by design - and down to decades-old housing policies which actively prevented African Americans from living in certain areas.

East of Troost Avenue in Kansas City

Kansas City, Missouri, is one of the country's most segregated cities. Drive around the west of Troost Avenue and there are large houses, their vast porches overlooking equally vast driveways. Properties are anything from $356,000 (£243,000) to $1.2m.

But you only have to go east to see a very different picture. Abandoned houses and unkempt lawns greet you at most corners. One building I pass is completely boarded up, with piles of rubbish outside, and the words "Stay Out" in spray paint.

The housing on either side of Troost is very much split down race lines.

The US government had a hand in this creating this segregation due to practices it instituted back in the 1930s, which prevented many blacks from getting on the property ladder in certain areas.

When the federal government began underwriting home loans for Americans to help boost the economy as part of the New Deal, strict guidelines were drawn up regarding where mortgages could be issued.

Areas where minorities lived were seen as risky investments and black families were routinely denied mortgages, locking them out of the housing market.

The practice was known as redlining because red ink marked out the minority areas. As Kansas City-based historian Bill Worley explained to me, these policies continued right into the 1960s, and excluded African Americans from one of the greatest motors of wealth in the 20th Century - home ownership.

A map of recent US Housing and Urban Development data shows segregated housing patterns. Each dot represents five people, with green representing black residents and orange representing whites

Redlining is now theoretically outlawed in the United States, and has been since the 1970s, but it's still happening to this day.

"Banks continue to build and structure their lending operations in a way that avoids or fails to meaningfully serve communities of colour, based on assumptions about the financial risk," Vanita Gupta, the justice department's top civil rights lawyer, said last September, as she pledged more action to stop discriminatory lending.

Another factor which made access to housing prohibitive were the restrictive racial covenants written into housing contracts.

Until 1948, it was perfectly legal for a black person to be prevented from buying or living in a house.

Bill Worley showed me an example of a restrictive racial covenant drawn up in Kansas City by the city's best known property developer during that time, JC Nichols.

"None of the said lots shall be conveyed to, used, owned nor occupied by Negroes as owner or tenants," it read. Other groups, including Jews, were also written into these kind of contracts.

The covenants created affluent white suburbs for middle- and upper-income families. By World War One, Nichols met developers in other cities who were also doing this. Huge new all-white suburbs sprang up across the country and the migration of white families to the suburbs became known as white flight.

An example of a racially restrictive covenant in Washington, DC in 1958 (DC public records, courtesy of Prologue DC)

Between redlining, racial covenants, and another practice known as blockbusting - where estate agents specialised in transitioning areas from white to black - segregation continued in the United States

Residential segregation in America peaked in 1970. More black families are moving into the suburbs and back to Southern cities they left after slavery ended, explains economic historian Leah Boustan.

"It may seem odd because we have stereotypes of the South, but residential segregation levels are lowest in Southern cities such as Atlanta, Houston and Dallas," she says.

But even though Atlanta is one of the least segregated cities in the United States, challenges persist.

One St Louis street has been known to residents as the 'dividing line'

On a visit to the city I met Nicole and Lewis Anderson, two African Americans who work in corporate jobs.

They told me they'd been profiled by estate agents, who've only shown them homes in certain "black" areas.

"When we started out we had a few whites in our area, but within a few years they all moved out," said Lewis Anderson.

"For us African Americans when we see a group of white people move to the neighbourhood we think that's good, we're cool with that. But for many white families that's not the case - they start to get discouraged, they start to worry about the property value and leave."

The Andersons said they've been discriminated against when looking for houses

There is plenty of evidence to suggest that Lewis and Nicole aren't alone in being encouraged to live in so-called "black" areas. Research from the US government shows that minorities looking for housing are shown fewer properties than their white counterparts.

The Fair Housing Act was passed more than 40 years ago to end discrimination in housing, but it's not been properly enforced.

Last year President Obama pledged to toughen up this law, with new rules. Now government money can only be given for new housing projects if they're shown to further integration in neighbourhoods, and there'll be penalties for those who don't adhere to this. But it only applies to public housing. Private developers can continue to build without such conditions.

"The Fair Housing Act commanded that communities that received government money do what they can to affirmatively further fair housing," Housing Secretary Julian Castro told me in an interview.

"The problem was that for many years that requirement was never adequately defined or enforced."

Julian Castro tells the BBC the Fair Housing Act was never properly enforced

Mr Castro, who sits in the president's cabinet and is widely tipped as a possible Democratic vice-presidential running mate in this year's election, said one way his department will ensure areas of poverty aren't ignored is by giving towns and cities access to demographic data, so they can plan housing better.

The key challenge remains - decades on from the civil rights movement, many black and white Americans simply don't mix. And as the US contends with race problems, getting to know each other better is one step in understanding and fixing some of those problems.

Follow Rajini on Twitter - @BBCRajiniv

'The Big Short' Explains the Global Financial Crisis

In this image released by Paramount Pictures, Christian Bale appears in a scene from "The Big Short." (Jaap Buitendijk/Paramount Pictures via AP)

By VOA News

In 2008, two big Wall Street firms, or companies that trade money and investments, collapsed.

The U.S. economy plunged into “the Great Recession.” That meant the economy was weak and many people lost money. It was the worst financial downturn since the 1930s.

In the U.S. alone, 8 million people lost their jobs. Six million people lost their homes. And trillions of dollars in consumer wealth was lost.

The financial crisis spread globally. From 2008 to 2012, economies around the world slowed. Unemployment rose. Stock markets fell, and international trade declined.

But how did all this happen?

Michael Lewis, the best-selling author of several books about Wall Street,explains how the financial crisis came about in a book called “The Big Short.” The New York Times calls it “one of the best business books of the past two decades.”

In finance, “to short” an investment means to bet that it will go down in value. There is a person on the other side of the trade who bets that the investment will go up in value.

“The Big Short” tells the story of four outsiders in the world of high finance who predict the credit and housing bubble collapse before anyone else does. They “short” the securities involved in the bubble and end up making a great fortune.

“The Big Short” has been made into a new movie by Adam McKay. It features outstanding performances by Academy Award-winning actors Christian Bale, Brad Pitt, Melissa Leo and Marisa Tomei.

The film points out that banking used to be a boring industry in the 1970s. But then in the early 1990s, Lewie Ranieri, a Wall Street banker, created what are called “mortgage-backed securities” (MBS).

Wall Street firms put thousands of home mortgages into one basket of securities and sold them to investors and banks.

These were considered safe investments, since homeowners historically had rarely failed to pay back their home loans. But the mortgage bankers lent money to people who weren’t financially sound enough to buy a house.So more and more risky mortgages were put in that basket of securities.

Yet the rating agencies — who are supposed to be objective and ethical --gave top ratings to these securities. And the regulators at the U.S.Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) seemed unaware of the impending crisis.

“The Big Short” reveals the fraud of Wall Street firms, such as Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers. It also shows the greed of the mortgage bankers and real estate industry. They were quick to offer loans to people without making sure they could pay them back.

The movie is fast-paced and riveting. It explores what made the central characters act the way they did. For example, Dr. Michael Burry, a hedge fund manager in San Jose, California, was one of the first to see the housing bubble and credit collapse.

Burry had a glass eye, which made him socially awkward and isolated from others. But because he felt like an outsider, he was comfortable challenging Wall Street about mortgage-backed securities.

Mark Baum, another central character in the film, lost his brother to suicide and was tortured by that loss. He also had a strong sense of moral outrage. He wanted to expose the truth about mortgage-backed securities.

The movie is brilliant at making complex concepts easy to understand. This is done with visual tools and by celebrities giving easy examples. For example, one scene shows Selena Gomez, the famous Latina singer and actress. She is shown gambling in Las Vegas with a crowd of fans surrounding her.

Gomez explains to the audience that some fans will bet that she will lose.Others will bet that she will win. The fans who bet correctly are like the people who successfully bet that mortgage-backed securities would fail.They made money when the securities collapsed.

In another scene, Anthony Bourdain, the well-known chef and television host, is shown cooking in the kitchen of a fancy restaurant. He takes three-day old fish, which has not sold, and throws it into a stew to sell to customers.

The customers do not know that they are getting fish that may be rotten. Bourdain says this is similar to what Wall Street did with risky mortgages as securities. They sold these securities to banks around the world, claiming they were fine products.

Vivid imagery makes the movie entertaining. But it also explains complex financial concepts.

The film closes on a serious note. In the wake of the debacle, the bankers who created the crisis were not punished. Instead, they received a huge bailout from the U.S. taxpayers. They used the money to pay themselves large bonuses. Only one of them went to jail.

And some Wall Street firms are still selling a product that is similar to a mortgage-backed security.

"The Big Short" tackles an important chapter in the history of global finance.

Mary Gotschall wrote this story for VOA Learning English. Kathleen Struckwas the editor.

One of the biggest fears about Obamacare never happened

An Obamacare sign on the UniVista Insurance company office in Miami. Joe Raedle/Getty Images)

By Max Ehrenfreund and Carolyn Y. Johnson - The Washington Post

During the debate over President Obama's signature health-care law, opponents warned that the law would discourage large numbers of Americans from working, force millions into part-time jobs and make it more difficult to find work. Three new studies released this week suggest that, so far, it hasn't happened.

The new analyses are still early, since a key requirement of the law began to be phased in just last year, but they add to a growing body of evidence that, if the law has had any effect on the labor market, it's been a small one.

"There were a lot of stories about employers, with anecdotes about employers shifting jobs to part-time," said Larry Levitt, an economist at the Kaiser Family Foundation not involved in the new research. "You can't deny those stories — they’re real. They’re just not generalizable. It’s not what is mostly happening, based on this study and others."

Last month, the Congressional Budget Office warned once again that Obamacare would discourage the equivalent of 2 million Americans from working by 2025, since they can get health insurance without relying on an employer.

Although the new studies don't rule out the dim long-term forecast, they do offer some reason for optimism — along with vindication for the White House. They found that overall, the Affordable Care Act had little impact on employment patterns. Critics had predicted that employers would shift workers to part-time schedules to avoid a requirement that they provide insurance to full-time employees. There was also a prediction that people might opt to work less because they could now obtain insurance through the marketplaces or expanded Medicaid coverage — neither of which was borne out by the data.

That isn't to say that individual people and employers haven't made changes because of the law. White Castle, a company that had warned it would reduce some employees' hours a few years ago, has changed its scheduling practices so more employees work fewer than 30 hours a week, the threshold at which large companies don't have to provide health coverage. Vice President Jamie Richardson said the company had 1,400 employees working 30 to 35 hours before the law and very few do today.

"In practice, if you're part time, you're going to be scheduled to work less than 30 hours per week," he said.

The studies show that White Castle is unusual, though. There aren't large numbers of workers choosing or being forced to work fewer hours as employers face the requirement to offer health insurance.

One study, published Tuesday in the journal Health Affairs, focuses on a widely criticized provision of the law that requires employers with at least 100 full-time workers to offer health insurance as of the beginning of 2015. (This year, that requirement is being extended to firms with more than 50 employees.) Critics worried that the provision would deter small businesses from expanding and would encourage them to cut their workers' hours. But this study is the latest in a series to conclude that Obamacare did not, in fact, widely result in more firms asking employees to work part time.

The authors examined Census data and found no increase in the likelihood of working part time, except for a 0.18 percentage point increase in the likelihood of working 25 to 29 hours per week between 2013 and 2014 — a trend that the authors say predated the ACA.

"These results are surprising to me, given that there was a concern that employers would make adjustments in employee work hours," said Asako Moriya, a service economist with the governmental Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality who led the work.

The study included another piece of evidence that appears to contradict the notion that the law would cause an increase in part-time work: The number of people working 25 to 29 hours a week in firms not subject to the mandate increased between 2012 and 2015, while the number of people at firms subject to the mandate slightly decreased.

Two groups of people were slightly more likely to work part time: workers with little education and older workers between 60 and 64 years old. There was suggestive, but not conclusive, evidence that the shifts were voluntary and not caused by employers cutting hours.

One reason that some workers might be voluntarily working fewer hours is to reduce their earnings in order to qualify for subsidized insurance from the federal government — either through the insurance marketplaces or through Medicaid.

A second Health Affairs study and a working paper issued Monday by the National Bureau of Economic Research both examined whether employees have chosen to work less in order to qualify for Medicaid, which became available to a larger group of people under health reform.

The new research on the effects of the Medicaid expansion does not suggest that people are looking to limit their earnings. On the contrary, some might even be looking to work more.

"In general, there's been no evidence that the ACA has done anything significant to employment," said Robert Kaestner, an economist at the University of Illinois at Chicago and one of the authors of the working paper, using the abbreviation for the Affordable Care Act. "We don't have to worry too much."

Previously, only people living in poverty were eligible for Medicaid, but the law expanded that group to people with incomes up to 138 percent of the federal poverty level. The Supreme Court, though, decided that the federal government couldn't require states to expand Medicaid.

That decision created an opportunity for researchers, such as Moriya — who is also one of the authors of the second article in Health Affairs — and Kaestner and his colleagues at the University of Illinois.

Following the decision, some states chose to expand Medicaid to a less impoverished group of people, while others did not, allowing the researchers to compare the change over time in the numbers of people working and their schedules in these two groups of states.

Obamacare's detractors had said that with access to Medicaid, some people earning between the poverty level and 138 percent of that level would quit working. They might have been working in jobs that did not pay well but offered health insurance sponsored by the employer. With insurance provided by Uncle Sam, people in that category might have decided going to work wasn't worth it.

At the same time, some people in that group who did not subscribe to insurance through their employers might have turned down additional hours or promotions in order to keep their incomes below 138 percent of the poverty level and maintain their newly acquired eligibility for Medicaid.

Moriya's group found that if some who gained Medicaid worked less as a result, their numbers were too small to measure reliably. Although they found that people were about 0.6 percentage points more likely to leave a job in the states that expanded Medicaid than in the states that maintained the program as it was, the difference was slight enough that it could have been due to chance.

In fact, according to the calculations by Kaestner's group, the labor market actually looked a little bit stronger in the states that expanded Medicaid.

That might be because some people whose incomes were below the poverty level before the expansion might have been working less to maintain their eligibility, and took on a second job or additional hours when the limit on income in their state increased to 138 percent of the poverty level.

"People can work more and earn more," Kaestner said. "It frees people to actually be able to work without getting penalized."

Moriya and her colleagues examined only the number of people leaving a job or working fewer hours, not the number taking on a new job or working more. As a result, their analysis might not have accounted for this positive aspect of the expansion, yielding more pessimistic numbers.

Yet neither group of researchers produced statistically significant results, suggesting that any effect on the labor market was likely very small.

There will be real economic effects of easier access to health insurance — people who retire earlier or stay home to take care of a child because they can get health insurance on their own. But as the data suggest, these changes are happening on the fringes.

So far, trying to detect the effect of the ACA on the job market is like "finding a needle in a haystack," Levitt said.

Obama embraces smart guns, thrilling proponents of the controversial technology

The Armatix iP1 pistol, which uses a watch to activate the gun. (Photo by Sebastian Widmann for The Washington Post)

By Michael S. Rosenwald January 5 at 11:10 AM - The Washington Post

Proponents of smart guns say President Obama’s executive action on gun control, which includes a directive for the government to research and potentially buy the controversial firearms, is the breakthrough they’ve been waiting for.

“I think this is the biggest advancement in personalized handgun policy to have taken place ever,” said Stephen Teret, a public health expert at Johns Hopkins University who has been researching and advocating for the technology since the early 1990s.

The idea behind smart guns is that only an authorized person can fire them. Proponents say this would cut down on suicides, stolen guns used in crimes, guns taken from police officers and used against them, and school shootings where students use their parents’ guns.

Researchers and startups are developing multiple ways to authorize users, ranging from fingerprints to wireless chips connected to rings or watches.

At an emotional press conference on Tuesday, Obama compared the technology to the fingerprint scanners that unlock cell phones, asking why the same thing couldn’t be used for guns. But critics of the technology will likely argue there’s a hole in that logic: phones aren’t made for self-defense and, unlike guns, it’s okay if you have to try a couple times to unlock them.

And the technology has not taken off in the marketplace. Some gun owners are leery about whether the technology works. Gun rights groups, including the National Rifle Association, fear the guns will be mandated.

The debate has been heated.

When Armatix, a German startup, tried to introduce its watch-authorized handgun in the United States two years ago, it was met with vehement protests, including threats to burn down a Maryland store that agreed to carry it. Protesters feared it would trigger a New Jersey law mandating all guns sold in the state be smart guns.

New Jersey lawmakers are close to repealing the mandate, prompting a renewed push. Smart gun proponents have been trying to convince law enforcement groups to embrace the technology, which would provide a financial boost to startups, potentially get big gun makers interested, and convince consumers the guns work.

Now smart gun backers have potentially found the biggest customer of them all: the federal government.

Obama has instructed the Defense Department, the Justice Department and Homeland Security “to conduct or sponsor research into gun safety technology” as well as “review the availability of smart gun technology on a regular basis, and to explore potential ways to further its use and development to more broadly improve gun safety.”

Lawrence G. Keane, general counsel for the National Shooting Sports Foundation, said his organization wasn’t opposed to the research. But it is opposed to mandates for purchases — either for citizens or government agencies.

Robert McNamara, whose Ireland-based company TriggerSmart has been working on technology to control guns with a ring, is also opposed to mandates. Obama’s move, he said, “finally looks like some investment in smart guns.”

“The gun makers are slow but I expect they will see the commercial opportunity and bring the NRA along with them,” he added.

Gun control advocates have been pushing Obama on smart guns. Late last year, a group connected to the Metro Industrial Areas Foundation, made up of citizens and faith leaders, sent a letter to President Obama urging him to raise $20 million for developing smart guns before he raises money for his presidential library and foundation.

The foundation’s leaders were thrilled with Obama’s announcement.

“By signaling to manufacturers that the federal government is in the market for smart guns, this action will create powerful incentives for responsible conduct by gun manufacturers,” said New Jersey rabbi Joel Mosbacher, an official with the group.

Teret, the Johns Hopkins researcher, thinks venture capitalists will also be willing to back smart gun startups now.

“This announcement is like a stick of dynamite in the log jam,” he said.