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Vincent Felitti, a Kaiser Permanente physician in San Diego in the 1990s, had a radical idea. Instead of just asking patients about their symptoms, what would happen if doctors asked them about their childhoods? His hypothesis, built on a hunch informed by experience, was that childhood trauma was connected to poor health later in life. Felitti helped lead an exhaustive study of 17,000 patients that seemed to confirm his theory. That was in 1998. But for years Felitti’s study and his...

In a talk titled “The Magnitude of the Solution: Building Self-Healing Communities,” Laura Porter, a national expert on adverse childhood experiences (ACEs), addressed an audience of over 200 clinicians, researchers, teachers, service providers and other community members on April 27, 2016 about the importance of understanding the impact of trauma on health. The talk was hosted by the Illinois ACEs Response Collaborative at Northwestern University’s Chicago Campus through generous support of...

A congressional briefing on the Science of Trauma, organized by U.S. Sen. Heidi Heitkamp (D-ND) and U.S. Rep. Grace Napolitano (D-CA), will be held at 2:30 pm, Wednesday, May 25, 2016, in 562 Dirksen Senate Office Building, Washington, DC. The Campaign for Trauma-Informed Policy and Practice (CTIPP) is sponsoring the event. CTIPP is a new organization comprising individuals and groups from all sectors and walks of life working together to create a better future by promoting trauma-informed...

The plan U.S. Rep. Todd Rokita, R-Indianapolis, has devised to cut back free and subsidized meals for poor school children reminds me of an old and cruel joke. The joke goes like this. A scientist who wanted to prove a point startedexperimenting with a frog. The scientist cut off one of the frog’s legs and yelled, “Jump!” The frog jumped. The scientist made a note. The scientist lopped off another leg and yelled again. Once more, the frog jumped. The scientist made another note. Another leg...

The judge is chewing gum. Her hair is piled in a messy bun on top of her head, where a pair of sunglasses also rests. She giggles shyly as she walks up to the podium and adjusts the microphone. Teen Court is now in session. A national diversion program, Teen Court is operated locally through the Boys and Girls Club of the Redwoods. The crime is real, the court is real and the sentence is real, although the emphasis is on rehabilitation rather than punishment. The goal is to steer young...

Millions of Americans live with the possibility that, at any moment, their wages or the cash in their bank accounts could be seized over an old debt. It’s an easily ignored part of America’s financial system, in part due to a common attitude that people who don’t pay their debts deserve what’s coming to them. A couple of years ago, we set out to find out more about the growing use of the courts to collect consumer debts. How many lawsuits are filed? Who is filing them? Who is getting sued?

Have you heard or said how entitled kids today are? Maybe you think they expect too much and aren't as strong, resilient, capable or whatever as you or other adults? Maybe you can't imagine how they live - having so much, insisting on so much and texting so much. Maybe you think they are terrible and we were better. Maybe you admire them and wish you could trade places. Maybe generalizations make you uncomfortable or you just aren't sure what you to think about the generational changes or...

Intergenerational Trauma is the idea that serious trauma can affect the children and grandchildren of those who had the first hand experience, due to living with a person suffering from PTSD and the challenges that can bring. What’s new is that, thanks to the emerging field of epigenetics, science is discovering that trauma is being passed down to future generations through more than simply learned behaviours. One widely reported example is of holocaust survivors passing on the effects of...

It takes government — a lot of government — for advanced societies to flourish. Today, advocates of anti-government free market, resolute in undermining the one entity that has been responsible for nearly a century of unprecedented economic and social progress, would have us think otherwise. But belief in government was once conventional wisdom in America: Over the last century, government played an enormous role in fostering American progress while allowing the United States to become a...

When the final bell announces the start of summer, the 21 million American children who rely on free or reduced-cost lunches during the school year will look ahead to what Lucy Melcher, the associate advocacy director for No Kid Hungry , calls “the hungriest time of the year.” The federal Summer Food Service Program (SFSP) was launched in 1968 and designed to provide children from low-income families with subsidized meals during the months when school is out of session. But that food only...

This week marks the 120th and 62nd anniversaries of the landmark Plessy v. Ferguson and Brown v. Board U.S. Supreme Court decisions, respectively. Plessy legalized the racial “separate but equal” policy on May 18, 1896. Brown reversed that decision on May 17, 1954, finding that anything separate is inherently unequal, especially given America’s unique history of racial discrimination. What the U.S. learned about itself in those six decades between those two rulings was supposed to guide...

Sometimes, we make the mistake of thinking that joy only resides in the big things. Birthdays. Baby showers. Weddings. Holidays. Vacations. Even weekends. But we can cultivate joy every day. We don’t have to wait for momentous once-a-year or once-a-week occasions. Below, two therapists share their strategies — some of which might be very familiar and others which just might surprise you. Get enough sleep You might not equate sleep with joy. But when you don’t get enough sleep, your ability...