Appalachia’s suicide rate is 17 percent higher than the national average, but not many mental health providers accept one of the region’s most popular forms of insurance. At the Beacon Barn Therapeutic Farm in Thornton, West Virginia, a typical day for Molly McCartney involves feeding horses—and seeing patients. McCartney, a clinical social […]
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Rural, Appalachian families who have children with autism suffer from lack of access to treatment; the wait for some programs can last years. One solution? Bring treatment to families. Via an RV. Children who are diagnosed with autism tend to be urban, male, white, and live with two parents with higher-than-average education. Every […]
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Since the Great Recession of 2008, rural employment is down 4% using the latest annual reports from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Hardest hit are counties where mining (including oil and natural gas production) predominates. Though still in the negative, manufacturing counties are closer to pre-recession levels than other nonmetro […]
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In recent months, the media spotlight on Appalachia has resulted in complicated conversations about whose mountains we inhabit and who’s telling our stories and how. This conversation rapidly escalated from a slow boil to a forest fire. I met with Aaron Carey of the Apalači folk metal band Nechochwen — […]
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My first and only newspaper internship was during the summer of 1987 at the now-defunct Charleston (W.Va.) Daily Mail. I was a graduate journalism student at West Virginia University and a native of Charleston, so it made sense to work at my hometown paper. What didn’t make sense were the […]
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In a recent ad, Rep. Evan Jenkins, R-W.Va., tags his primary rival for a U.S. Senate seat as someone who handed out freebies to undocumented immigrants. In the ad against West Virginia Attorney General Patrick Morrisey, a narrator says, “In Congress, Morrisey wrote the health care law giving free health care […]
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