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The current adverse childhood experience (ACE) survey does not include exposure to community violence (ECV) as a category. A new study by Lee, Larkin, and Esaki (2017) point to evidence that ECV fits the World Health Organization (WHO)’s classification for an ACE category, that it must: cause biological stress response, be sensitive to policies, be common across societies, be able to be measured quickly and easily, and be proximal in respect to causality (WHO, 2011). Lee et al. (2017)...

My depression emerged when I was only six years old. It started after my dad abandoned my mom, my sister, and me. He was abusive to my mom, but I was still devastated when he left because we’d been very close. He left us with months of unpaid rent. We didn’t have any food. Sometimes we would eat ice for dinner. I endured so much turmoil and suffering as a child. It was a level of trauma that made it hard for me to get through every single day. Meanwhile, I was being bullied in school. I...

One day several years ago, I spontaneously hugged a patient of mine, Gretchen. It was during a moment in which her despair and distress were so intense that it seemed cruel on a human level not to reach out my arms to her, in the event that she might derive some relief or comfort from an embrace. She hugged me for dear life.

Looking for a way to help manage anxiety ? Grab a pen. Logging your stressors in a journal might help mitigate those emotions, according to new research presented at the Anxiety and Depression Association of America’s 2017 conference. Researchers found that those who wrote down each event that caused concern, as well as an analysis of how the concern made them feel, experienced less worry over time . The results indicate that keeping a journal could be an effective tool as part of an overall...

When you go to a doctor’s office, do they ask you how you feel emotionally? Research suggests that they should, because physical health and mental health are connected. In a ten-year study, Intermountain Healthcare found important correlations in helping people heal better by using team-based practices with patients, including having mental health experts in the doctor’s office. The study was published in Journal of the American Medical Association and recently won the national Hearst Health...

Here is an excerpt from a GREAT article by Jay Watts : Psychological and social factors are at least as significant and, for many, the main cause of suffering. Poverty , relative inequality , being subject to racism, sexism, displacement and a competitive culture all increase the likelihood of mental suffering – as the survivor-led collective Recovery in the Bin brilliantly illuminates. Add into the mix individual experiences such as childhood sexual abuse , early separation , emotional...

Elisabeth Corey writes so honestly on her Beating Trauma blog . I'm a huge fan of her writing and advocacy work. This piece, in particular, is amazing. She writes about adult relationships and how they have been impacted deeply and consistently by ACEs in childhood. We know what we have lived. Unlearning and learning new and different things takes time and work. And it helps, that parents like Elisabeth share as they learn. We all benefit from that sharing. Many of us are learning how to...

Pam Bunyon faced the 4th graders, some splayed in chairs but most arrayed on the rug before her. On the whiteboard, she showed them the outline of a human head. Next to it were some big words for the 9- and 10-year-olds: Cortex. Amygdala. Brain stem. Bunyon, the counselor at Powel Elementary School, was using science to help students understand their impulses and give them strategies to deal with them. “So we don’t flip out,” as she and the class put it. [For more of this story, written by...

The idea that locking up parents can have baleful effects on their children’s health isn’t exactly new. I have written before about research that found links between the incarceration of parents and learning disabilities, developmental delays and behavior problems, even after other variables were taken into account. But a new paper published Thursday in the British journal The Lancet makes clear just how unequal the effects of incarceration can be on families in the United States, which...

State lawmakers are considering a measure to declare youth violence as a public health epidemic. The House Resolution sponsored by Democrat Bruce Franks Jr. of St. Louis calls for the establishment of statewide trauma-informed education. Franks contends PTSD – Post Traumatic Stress Disorder – is a condition that afflicts kids who’ve experienced violence. “The fact that I am 33 and I have been to now 155 funerals, an average of seven funerals since the age of six is not normal” said Franks.

Even for an administration that has made anti-immigrant rhetoric routine, the speech that Attorney General Jeff Sessions gave on Tuesday was shocking in both tone and content. Sessions was ostensibly announcing a set of tough new measures targeting gangs, which he described as “criminal organizations that turn cities and suburbs into warzones, that rape and kill innocent citizens and who profit by smuggling poison and other human beings across our borders.” But in practice, these measures...

In the spring and summer of 2011, researchers from the University of Pennsylvania strapped heart monitors onto test subjects and set them loose on the side streets of Philadelphia. The subjects strolled around two clusters of vacant lots. Some of the lots had received a “greening” treatment from members of the Philadelphia Horticulture Society, who’d removed debris, planted grass and trees, and installed a low wooden post-and-rail fence. The other lots were untreated as a control. After...