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With less than 20 days before the start of the first National Conference for Creating Trauma-Sensitive Schools , organizers from the Attachment & Trauma Network (ATN) announce that attendees from three continents and 38 states will descend on Washington DC Feb 18-20 to explore the latest in best practices on trauma-informed education. “We had no idea that teachers and administrators from nearly every state and so many other countries would join us in DC in mid-winter,” says Julie Beem,...

A decade of work with children damaged by horrific experiences has shown a Duke researcher that the first step forward is ensuring the child knows that trauma is not destiny. “It’s saying something bad happened to you, not that you’re a bad kid,” says Katie Rosanbalm , research scientist at the Center for Child and Family Policy . For the past 10 years, Rosanbalm has been working with local school systems and child services agencies in North Carolina to better identify and treat children who...

For the past seven years, Jess King has directed a business development nonprofit in her hometown of Lancaster, Pennsylvania. She watched the community’s poverty rate climb to 30 percent over that time, well above that of the state’s two largest cities, Pittsburgh and Philadelphia. She also saw how state and federal policy influenced the very real decisions of real people in her community, often in increasingly negative ways. Fed up, in 2016, she decided to run for Congress in Pennsylvania’s...

It’s hard to fathom a life more miserable than the life Renard Marcel Daniel has lived. Born into a world of chaos and violence, sexually abused as a child, laboring through his early teenage years in and out of school with significant intellectual disabilities, Daniel today sits in an Alabama prison for a double-murder he committed in September 2001. Convicted in 2003, he spent more than a decade on the state’s death row until, in 2016, he caught a break. A random draw of federal appeals...

For the last two years, the University of Illinois has been trying an unconventional treatment for homeless "super-user" patients at emergency rooms: it finds them a place to live. [To listen to this story by MILES BRYAN or to read the transcript, go to https://www.npr.org/2018/01/30/581778796/er-use-goes-down-as-hospital-program-pays-homeless-peoples-rent ]

Over the past decade, Dr. Nadine Burke Harris, the founder of the Center for Youth Wellness, in Bayview Hunters Point, San Francisco, has emerged as one of the country’s strongest voices calling for a national public health campaign to raise awareness and a sense of urgency about the devastating and potentially lifelong health effects of childhood trauma. Since the original research on adverse childhood experiences, known as the ACE Study, was published in 1998, a growing body of evidence...

There’s been quite a bit of research linking financial insecurity to poor health outcomes. The connection is, on its face, an obvious one, as a depleted checking account can cause stress, which can manifest in our bodies and minds. A new study by researchers at Boston Medical Center furthers that unfortunate connection: It finds housing instability, including chronically late rent payment, can affect the mental and physical health of family members of all ages. “People talk a lot about...

Eighty-five percent of voters believe that rehabilitation, rather than punishment, should be the goal of the criminal justice system in America, according to a new poll conducted by Public Opinion Strategies on behalf of Justice Action Network. Republicans (79%), Independents (83%), and Democrats (92%) agree that the criminal justice system should focus on rehabilitation rather than punishment. Three-fourths of Americans believe that the criminal justice system is in need of significant...

About 10 years ago, in her Bayview-Hunters Point clinic, Dr. Nadine Burke Harris examined a 7-year-old boy who was the height and weight of a 4-year-old. When she discovered that he had stopped growing after he was sexually abused, Harris started drawing connections with her other patients. She noticed that childhood trauma and adverse experiences negatively affected health. In her book “The Deepest Well,” Burke Harris explores the connection between poor health and toxic stress during...

Around 12 percent of mothers in the U.S. experience depression, and that number is even higher for minorities and those that live in poverty. Beyond affecting their own health, maternal depression can greatly impact mothers' capacity to care for their children. Members of PolicyLab’s Intergenerational Family Services portfolio wrote a brief on how states can address maternal depression through actionable, evidence-based policy solutions. We hope this can be helpful in your work as well. You...

As a health teacher for the Shenendehowa school district, Dustin Verga sees firsthand the pressures today's youth are under. They've grown up in an era of over-testing, jam-packed schedules, high expectations to get into a top college, and dual lives — one in the real world and one online, where the pressure to curate a picture-perfect life and rack up "likes" is ever-present. That's why the introduction of mental health literacy in New York schools this coming fall is such a big deal, Verga...

For several months, the Childrens Health Insurance Program (CHIP) was in limbo. Its budget expired and Congress took no action to reauthorize it. Then, relief came as part of the bill that ended the government shutdown last week . But the future of another vital health service remains uncertain. The more than 10,000 community health centers that treat low-income Americans have not seen a funding reauthorization . The centers, funded by the Affordable Care Act, retain bipartisan support, The...