Blog

For the last five years I have been doing trauma recovery workshops with veterans incarcerated in a county jail. We've served some 600 men. Virtually all have PTSD. Surprisingly a large portion of the source of this trauma predates their enlistment, that is they have substantial ACEs. In writing about this experience I have come across the following study to share in hopes it will be valuable to others here: Disparities in Adverse Childhood Experiences Among Individuals With a History of...

“Trauma-informed care” is a movement. Service providers are talking about it. Researchers are studying it. Theorists are writing about it. Academics are teaching it. Practitioners are implementing it. What is trauma informed care? SAMHSA (2014) seeks to answer this question by providing a list of trauma-informed principles. These include: Safety Trustworthiness and transparency Peer support Collaboration and mutuality Empowerment, voice, and choice Understanding culture, history, and gender...

Join the national – and international – awareness campaign to break the painful silence and offer hope to the vulnerable kids and teens impacted by parental addiction. While some of these children find a supportive adult who helps protect them from the worst, others may be alone and unaware that healing is possible. As rates monitoring addiction continue to rise, as well as its related overdose, we cannot afford to forget the countless children – those who are often the first hurt and last...

Please join this ACEs Connection co-sponsored webinar "Making Meaningful Change: Addressing ACEs through Public Policy" on Feb. 18 (11:30 am-1:00 pm ET) presented by the Health Federation of Philadelphia and MARC (Mobilizing Action for Resilient Communities). In this webinar, three nationally recognized experts will discuss policy and advocacy strategies on a local, state, and national level using evidence from studies they have conducted with legislators and the general public. Speakers...

By Brent Sugimoto, American Academy of Family Physicians, January 29, 2020 Quick quiz: Which of the following is not associated with exposure to adverse childhood experiences, also known as ACEs? [child being threatened] A) Heart disease B) Cancer C) Chronic lung disease D) Obesity E) Parkinson's disease The answer: All of the above conditions have been closely associated with ACEs except Parkinson's disease, but a recent study suggests that even Parkinson's disease(www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov) may...

By Daniel J. Levitin, Thrive Global, January 28, 2020 Stress is also an emotion, one that we share with other animals and with one another across the life span, although the causes of stress can be quite variable. Chronic stress is especially harmful. Stress is also highly variable—what would stress out one person another takes in stride, and vice versa. Stress can have a substantial impact on longevity. Consider an experiment with Pacific salmon. After swimming upstream to spawn, and...

By Bridget M. Kuehn, JAMA Network, January 29, 2020 For many sexual assault survivors whom Anita Ravi, MD, MPH, sees as a New York City–based family physician, the prospect of even basic medical care can be frightening. Some have put off Papanicolaou tests and mammograms for years or even decades. To help them, Ravi has adopted a trauma-informed approach that works to restore patients’ trust and give them a greater sense of control over their visit. This may include asking permission before...

By Rachel A. Davis and Howard Pinderhughes, California Health Report, December 19, 2019 Earlier this month, California’s Surgeon General Nadine Burke Harris launched an ambitious campaign to reduce adverse childhood experiences, which can cause lifelong health problems. With more than 60 percent of Californians saying they were exposed to a traumatic childhood event, adverse childhood experiences are at crisis levels in the state. The ACEs Aware campaign will train and pay health care...

By Eric Rosand, B. Heidi Ellis, and Stevan Weine, The Brookings Institute, January 28, 2020 Senior officials from governments fighting ISIS are meeting this week, and they would do well to consider how better to repatriate children of ISIS fighters. Disagreements over whether or not countries should be doing more to try to repatriate their citizens, particularly the children, remain. Yet rather than focusing on those seemingly intractable differences, members of the global coalition to...

By John Kelly, The Chronicle of Social Change, January 26, 2020. A new federal report has found nothing new: time in foster care is associated with negative circumstances later in life. The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) just published findings from a fairly novel approach to assessing the impact of foster care experience as people move from young adulthood into middle age-dom. A group of researchers within HHS used six years of responses to the National Survey of Family...

By John Kelly, The Chronicle of Social Change. Tavon Rolbiecki was born exposed to multiple drugs and alcohol. While relatives stepped up to take him home, he ended up in Chisago County foster care. Latonia Rolbiecki became a licensed foster parent, favored by an independent expert as the right person to raise Tavon. That didn’t persuade Chisago County. An eight-day hearing would determine if Chisago County unjustly kept Latonia Rolbiecki from her grandson – and if it was too late to make...

By Brentin Mock, City Lab, January 28, 2020. On November 18, two women walked in through the unlocked door of a vacant three-bedroom house on West Oakland’s Magnolia Street, set up small bedrooms for themselves and their children, and settled in for an occupation designed to call attention to the Bay Area’s housing affordability crisis. Over the next few months, this collective of formerly unhoused women grew in size—and power. Calling themselves Moms 4 Housing , the group remained in 2928...