Author: TECH

The California State Association of Counties honored Kern Behavioral Health and Recovery Services at the 2025 Challenge Awards in Sacramento on Wednesday.Behavioral health was recognized for its Mobile Evaluation Team Communications Center Program, an effort that embeds behavioral health staff directly in 911 dispatch centers across Kern County.“There were over 400 entries for this Challenge Award, and they presented 15 of them Wednesday night, so out of 400, Kern County was one of just 15 recognized,” said Tonya Maddox, KernBHRS crisis services administrator.Agency Director Alison Burrowes said in a news release Thursday that the agency is proud to receive the…

When it comes to national politics, Americans are fiercely divided across a range of issues, including gun control, election security, and vaccines. It’s not new for Republicans and Democrats to be at odds over issues, but things have reached a point where even the idea of compromising appears to be anathema, making it more difficult to solve thorny problems.But things are much less heated at the local level. A survey of more than 1,400 local officials by the Carnegie Corporation and CivicPulse found that local governments are “largely insulated from the harshest effects of polarization.” Communities with fewer than 50,000…

Love and relationships can take a serious toll on your mental health. MindNation’s 2025 WellBeing Survey finds that nearly 30% of respondents identify relationship problems as a key driver of their mental health challenges, revealing the real emotional toll of unresolved conflict, poor communication, and relational stress. Despite this, formal psychological support remains low as many rely on family or friends, or seek help only as a last resort. This Valentine’s, it’s time to rethink what giving love really means. MindNation is shifting the focus from fleeting gestures to meaningful investments in emotional resilience, self-worth, and healthier relationships. From February…

You know that moment when your brain has 37 tabs open and every tab is screaming “urgent”? That’s the DIY life when it starts to crack. Doing everything yourself can feel heroic and efficient until it turns into late nights, dropped balls, and that dread when your inbox refreshes. Delegating can feel like the opposite: messy, slower, and slightly terrifying because someone else might do it “wrong.” Here’s the truth: both can work. The win is choosing the right mode for the right season and building a system you can trust. Delegation Is Not Less Work, It’s Different Work Let’s…

Source: LeoPatrizi / Getty Somewhere along the way, beauty routines stopped feeling indulgent and started feeling obligatory. Let’s change that with 10 beauty rituals that feel like self-care and not a chore. We all know the wash day that takes half a Saturday. The layered skincare steps feel more like a science experiment than self-love. The unspoken pressure to always look put together. What should be sacred mirror time can easily turn into another task on a never-ending list. But beauty was never supposed to exhaust you. At its best, beauty is ritual. And ritual is about intention. It is…

Hyderabad: In recent decades, psychologists and neuroscientists have begun to look beyond conventional Western therapy models.Many are taking a serious interest in regional healing traditions, systems of care that evolved within local cultures and persisted for generations.Combining various practices These traditions encompass physical practices, ritual acts, movement, music, storytelling and community involvement. Modern research is not merely cataloguing these practices; it is investigating why they work, for whom and how their mechanisms intersect with psychological processes.Understanding healing traditions through a psychological lensRegional healing traditions are not merely cultural artefacts; they embody methods of regulation, emotional, cognitive, social, and physiological. Modern…

Fr0ggy – via unsplash It was only a few months ago that Juan Leon became the proud owner of Minnesota’s newest tow truck service. Not long after, he began to get calls about abandoned vehicles and realized there was a pattern. Whether it was parked on the side of the street or in the lot of a business, their owners were just gone. In most if not all such cases, he would learn, they had been arrested by ICE during its Operation Metro Storm. Whether one supports the efforts of the agency to deport illegal immigrants, it left behind a…

Cavan Images | Cavan | Getty ImagesAt the start of 2025, during President Joe Biden’s final weeks in office, lawmakers pushed forward with last-minute major legislation that provides Social Security benefit increases to certain public pensioners.The Social Security Fairness Act was passed with an overwhelming bipartisan majority in both the House and Senate, and Biden signed it into law on Jan. 5, 2025.Now, several senators are calling on the Social Security Administration to reconsider what they say is a flaw in the law’s implementation: retroactive payments limited to six months rather than one year for certain beneficiaries.The Social Security Fairness…

The rules of digital delivery have been rewritten. AI now shapes how digital experiences are designed, built and shipped. Portfolios are expanding. Websites, apps, documents and interfaces multiply faster than teams can manually govern. Every touchpoint now carries operational weight; each can introduce friction, risk or failure.   At scale, digital accessibility is a dependency. When it fails, it fails late – after sign-off, after build, right before launch, or worse, when it disrupts a user’s experience.   Campaigns pause. Costs spike. Momentum stalls.   Tightening regulations raise the stakes. The European Accessibility Act (EAA) now attaches concrete consequences to inaccessible…

As my family and I were not eligible for the DFG, we paid for the adaptations ourselves, to the tune of around £24,000, by taking out a bank loan. Had we been able to buy a wheelchair-user home from the outset we could have avoided the stress and cost of major adaptations, as it would have met my access requirements as well as those of future generations of disabled households. People I know have had to relocate miles away from their community and support network just to get a home that meets only some of their accessibility requirements. Can we…