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Extreme stress and young brains are a bad combination, something that sets in motion feelings and behaviors that can haunt us long into adulthood. And just in time for the school year, a new study may help explain why. The Duke University study used neuro-imaging to look at the biological effect of childhood stress on the adult brain. It's important research, because it parallels existing knowledge about the relationship of stress to unhealthy behavior. For families, the timing is important...

Twice a week in St. Louis, at around 5 p.m., a line begins to form in front of a truck. The people waiting are all homeless. Most haven’t had a shower in over a month, but that’s what awaits them when they reach the front of the line. Since it officially launched in May, the Shower to the People truck has been making its way around St. Louis, docking in various locations on Monday and Thursday evenings. The project’s founder, Jake Austin, says that in a typical five-hour shift, as many as 50...

Just about everyone is talking about the Pinellas County mother, 62-year-old Kathleen Steele, who has been charged after her 6-year-old son allegedly beat his infant sister to death. Friday night Steele bonded out of jail while her son and his 3-year-old brother have been placed in separate foster homes. Brigit Towey is a licensed mental health counselor and a certified child protection professional. She's the executive director of Life, Beauty and Balance, 10013 Water Works Lane in...

Black children and young adults are about half as likely as their white counterparts to get mental health care despite having similar rates of mental health problems, according to a study published today [Friday, Aug. 12] in the International Journal of Health Services. Hispanic youth also get only half as much mental health care as whites. The study used data on children under 18 and young adults 18-34 from the Medical Expenditure Panel Survey covering all 50 states for the years 2006-2012.

Juvenile justice professionals are evolving to better understand the impact of trauma on youth. In 2012 the U.S. Attorney General’s National Task Force on Children Exposed to Violence called for organizations to provide trauma-informed care and develop trauma-informed policies. Since 2013 in Texas, all juvenile supervision officers receive state-mandated trauma-informed care training. The six-hour training provides critical components that go beyond traditional verbal de-escalation...

T he BOP notified one of the country’s leading private prison companies, Corrections Corporation of America, on July 29 that a long-troubled federal prison the company had operated for 16 years will be closed down. The notice is exceptional in the BOP’s history of overseeing its privatized prisons—in the last decade, it has ended only three other private prison contracts before they were set to expire—and it follows reporting by The Nation and the Investigative Fund that documented poor...

There are some wounds that never heal — some injuries that are invisible to the naked eye, even though they scar the individual forever. Decades of research suggests that the wounds created by child abuse and neglect inflict serious physical and mental health issues on individuals later in life, including cancer, depression, substance abuse, and chronic fatigue. The correlation between adverse early childhood experiences and poor health later in life was famously uncovered in a study by...

U.S. Sen. Heidi Heitkamp said Friday she will host the Senate Indian Affairs Committee’s first field hearing on the impacts of trauma on Native American communities next week in Bismarck. The hearing will begin at 9:15 a.m. Wednesday at the Lewis Goodhouse Wellness Center at United Tribes Technical College in Bismarck. Heitkamp’s office said the hearing builds on a series of congressional briefings she initiated in May in Washington, D.C., to raise awareness among members of Congress about...

By Adrienne Cole Johnson, L.T. Moon, Ram Bhagat and Trey Hartt Justice is a common theme throughout American history, with varying perceptions of goals and definitions along the way. While some may feel as though justice is alive and well, many, many citizens with a close pulse on the diverse communities of our country are identifying with a growing perception of the divide regarding just and fair treatment for individuals within the intersection of race, class, and culture. Attempting to...

Editor’s Note: Southern California Group’s sister publications in the San Francisco Bay Area produced this report, the latest installment in their series investigating doctors’ use of powerful anti-psychotic drugs to control the behavior of the state’s foster children. For years, few questioned how doctors treated the emotional trauma of California’s abused and neglected children — and nobody monitored how often they handed out psychiatric drugs that can turn fragile childhoods into battles...

Remember middle school? Remember how everything could be mortifying, especially if you didn't have the right brand of jeans or that certain kind of backpack or the expensive boat shoes everyone else (yes, everyone, Mom!) has? Now imagine middle school if you not only couldn't afford those brands, but you couldn't even find a way to clean the clothes you do have. The prospect might just be mortifying enough to make you skip class altogether. Now, two school districts have found that the...

As I write this, we are 10,288 strong! Sometime over the last month, we passed 10,000. Just three short years ago there were 1,000 members of ACEsConnection. This isn't your kids' social network. We don't just yammer or tweet or FB or snapchat at each other. The people who are part of ACEsConnection are either using the knowledge of ACEs science to change themselves, their families, their organizations, their systems or their communities....or they're planning on it. The other milestone was...