Across the country, we have seen a growing awareness of the relationship between traumatic life experiences and health. The foundation of this research is a study produced in 1998 by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and Kaiser Permanente, commonly referred to as the Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACE) Study. The ACE Study illuminated the fact that for each adverse life experience a child endures, including abuse, neglect and household dysfunction, there is a direct and calculable increase in the likelihood that the child will later develop health complications at a higher rate than other individuals who have not experienced this same trauma.
Often mental illness will manifest with no discernible cause, but much of our current mental health crisis is in fact related to these adverse life experiences. Dr. Bela Sood, of the Virginia Treatment Center for Children at VCU, is addressing adverse childhood experiences in the best way possible: prevention. She is collaborating with parents, families and community partners in the East End of Richmond to develop programs to prevent community violence and to improve the atmosphere in schools and neighborhoods. It is far better to prevent adverse experiences than to manage their aftermath.
[For more of this story, written by Cheryl Al-Mateen, go to http://www.richmond.com/opinio...7e-36143ded2ed4.html]
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