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Twenty years ago, Jim lived under a highway bridge in New Haven, Connecticut. He was in his 50s and had once been in the Army. After an honorable discharge, he bounced from one job to another, drank too much, became estranged from his family, and finally ended up homeless. A New Haven mental health outreach team found him one morning sleeping under the bridge. His neon yellow sneakers stuck out from underneath his blankets. The team tried for months to get Jim to accept psychiatric services.

Flinching as a gunshot whizzes past your window. Covering your ears when a police car races down your street, sirens blaring. Walking past a drug deal on your block or a beating at your school. For kids living in picket-fence suburbia, these experiences might be rare. But for their peers in urban poverty, they are all too commonplace. More than half of children and adolescents living in cities have experienced some form of community violence – acts of disturbance or crime, such as drug use,...

Do holiday family gatherings stir up feelings of excitement and dread at the same time? Do you feel a little thrown off your game as your visit gets underway? Maybe you’re like the golfer in this story. Stick with me here — it relates back to holiday stress, I promise: There’s an old joke about a golfer who meets up with a friend to play a round of nine. The friend is not a good player, so he asks for two “gotchas” to help even the game. The golfer says, “You mean two ‘gimmies'” — two shots...

Are you rocking #ACEsScience and want to give your amazing work a shout out? Share your work in 500 words or less and submit it NOW! The ACEs Conference Project Showcase is a unique way to focus a spotlight on current research, programs, tools or other initiatives that use ACEs science to address childhood adversity and its impact. Before submitting, please consider the following: Project submissions should align with the conference theme of “Action to Access,” and its three intentions to...

On June 5th, Social Strata , which administers our network, finished a several-month process to make ACEs Connection more secure and to give us more control over our information. You'll note that our url now begins with "https", which stands for Hyper Text Transfer Protocol Secure . It means all communications between your browser and ACEs Connection are encrypted. Also, as the Social Strata folks explained, you may (or may not) be aware, the EU last year passed a strong set of guidelines...

Lincoln Park Public Schools announced Monday that the district is implementing the Resilient Schools Project, an initiative aimed at reducing the impact of childhood trauma on students. With childhood trauma linked to high-risk behaviors from drug abuse to smoking and from promiscuity to depression, the aim is to increase students’ resilience in the face of the adversities around them. The program builds on a holistic education movement centered on the whole child, inside and outside of the...

Many of the children who visit the St. John’s Well Child and Family Center at 58th and Hoover in South Los Angeles are anything but well. The dentists treat children who suffer excruciating pain from swollen gums and rotting teeth. “I just had a 2 1/2-year-old I had to refer for full mouth reconstruction,” said Dr. Shidrokh Mafi, who gets frustrated by parents who don’t follow advice about making sure their children brush, floss and avoid baby bottle syndrome — the decay caused by sugars...

Young women, especially young women of color, get less exercise than their male counterparts, and the disparities worsen after high school ends. This is the finding of a new study published Monday in the journal JAMA Pediatrics. As teens, 88 percent of boys report being physically active compared to 78 percent of girls. Once the days of high school soccer games, track practice and PE class have ended, around 73 percent of young men stay active, but only 62 percent of women do. [For more on...

Ellen and I began writing this book eight years ago after research with trauma counselors in 14 different states. This book complements ACES Science 101 . It illustrates how the impact of the entire traumatized family (not just the child) causes adverse childhood experiences. In short, we have to treat the entire family that is traumatized, not just the child. As a result, this book was written to address three current gaps in trauma-informed treatment: #1: The Traumatized Child and Family...

For many nonprofits, there is little new about trying to move the needle by seeing the big picture, understanding all the pieces, addressing root causes, or influencing institutions and structures. What is different about this moment in time—a time of sustained racism, xenophobia, police brutality, sexual violence, war, gender injustice, gun violence, Islamophobia, climate change, and more—is the immediate urgency and commitment to stretch the bounds of what is possible, to figure out how to...

Trauma-Informed Approaches (TIA) recognize the impact of trauma on the human experience. Everyone experiences trauma differently, and our experiences create a lens through which we view, and process, stressors. Training in TIA not only enhances professionals’ abilities to recognize and accommodate people in crisis to ensure their success. If applied habitually, these principles allow us to help all students (or clients, or patients), and not just those about whose trauma we are already aware.

Attorney General Jeff Sessions is imposing sharp new limits on who can get asylum in the United States, ruling in a closely-watched case that most migrants fleeing domestic violence or gang violence will not qualify. "Asylum was never meant to alleviate all problems — even all serious problems — that people face every day all over the world," Sessions said this morning in a speech before immigration judges in Virginia. Sessions announced his decision this afternoon. As attorney general,...