Blog

On October 15th, Governor Jerry Brown wrapped up the first year of a two-year legislative session by signing some bills and vetoing others. Three of those signed bills had been supported by 150 individuals from all around the state on Policymaker Education Day in July, as part of the California Campaign to Counter Childhood Adversity ( 4CA ): AB 340 (Arambula): Creates a statewide advisory body to review how trauma is detected in children as early as possible. Specifically, it brings...

Crawford and Erie County in Northwest Pennsylvania joined together again this fall to host the 4 th Annual Trauma Informed and Resilient Communities Conference at Edinboro University . This entirely free conference was well attended with approximately 355 participants who sold out the venue in less than one day. Our morning plenary promoted the themes of building community resilience and the Pennsylvania opioid crisis. It began with a brief introduction to ACES through 3 short videos. We...

Slightly under half of the approximately 219,000 women incarcerated in the United States right now are in local jails, and 60 percent of these jailed women have not been convicted, but are still awaiting trial, according to a new report produced jointly by The Prison Policy Initiative and the ACLU’s Campaign for Smart Justice. The report, “Women’s Mass Incarceration: The Whole Pie 2017”- —authored by Aleks Kajstura, the Legal Director of the Prison Policy Initiative—is an addition to a...

The children of immigrants make up less than one-fourth of the nation’s youth population yet account for 30 percent of children living in poverty, a new report finds. More than that, young black and brown Americans were worse off compared to white and Asian-American children, the Annie E. Casey Foundation said. The foundation analyzed youth welfare along several axes, including education, health and economic indicators, to come up with an index of how well young people in various racial and...

Majorities in many ethnic, identity and racial groups in America believe that discrimination exists against their own group, across many areas of people's daily lives, according to a poll from NPR, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. The poll asked a wide range of questions about where Americans experience discrimination — from the workplace to the doctor's office — and people's perception of it. The groups polled include whites, blacks,...

The time we’re living in requires an extraordinary understanding of who we are, what we’re working toward, and how to get there. As people committed to social justice in the time of Trump, we have a twofold challenge: resisting an administration that came into power through an election won on the dehumanization of marginalized people, while also being mindful not to reproduce the devastating hierarchies that mimic that power. So far, we’ve largely come up short. A new book by Jordan...

Yes, most of us are stressed out these days. And, yes, we're aware that mindfulness meditation can help cushion the corrosive effects of stress on our bodies. But who has time to take a class, or practice for hour after hour? It turns out that may not be necessary. New research reports a two-week mindfulness meditation program delivered via a smartphone app effectively reduced tense participants' physical reactivity to stress. Importantly, this effect was only found when the program...

There was a time not long ago when this reporter was, shall we say, stretched a bit thin. At night, she lay in her bed, which was covered with laundered and not-yet-folded yoga pants, attempting to gain respite. Yet none would come. Instead, she would play mental chess with various cost-benefit analyses, or she would arrange and rearrange her mental to-do list, as though, like so much broccoli under a pile of mashed potatoes, moving it around a bit would make it disappear. Then, this...

CALOUA LOWE BOUNDS up the rickety, worn staircase of a three-story, red brick building in Camden, New Jersey on a sunny September morning, the wooden steps creaking under the pressure of her red-sandaled feet. The walls display framed, Photoshopped images: a mockup of Vogue, album covers featuring young men standing shoulder to shoulder with rap legends like Jay-Z. They were designed by the roughly 1,200 youths who, like Lowe, have come here over the years to learn Photoshop, HTML,...

It was the murder of a beloved patient that led to a seismic shift in the Women’s HIV Program at the University of California, San Francisco : a move toward a model of trauma-informed care. “She was such a soft and gentle person,” said Dr. Edward Machtinger, the medical director of the program, who recalled how utterly devastated he and the entire staff were by her untimely death. “This murder woke us up,” he said. ”It just made us take a deeper look at what was actually happening in the...

The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation recently released a national survey of children's health that shows almost half of American kids experience traumatic experiences. The study was produced by CAHMI, the Child and Adolescent Health Measurement Initiative . Martha Davis is Senior Program Officer at the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. She is disturbed by the compendium in the 2016 edition of the National Survey of Children's Health and an analysis conducted by CAHMI. "What it shows is a state...

In her inaugural speech as the head of the Royal College of General Practitioners recently, Professor Helen Stokes-Lampard chose to focus her remarks on loneliness. “GPs see patients, many of whom are widowed, who have multiple health problems,” she said. “But often their main problem isn’t medical. They’re lonely. These patients need someone to listen to them, and to find purpose in life.” Stokes-Lampard is not the first leading medical professional to express concern about the impact that...