Blog

By Caren Chesler, Illustration: Washington Post Illustration/iStock, The Washington Post, September 23, 2022 Police in a small but growing number of states are trying a new tactic on calls when someone is threatening suicide. They respond, assess and sometimes, depending on the situation, they leave. It’s happening in Fresno, Calif., where last year, police were called to the home of a man who barricaded himself in his house with a gun and was threatening to kill himself and police, if they...

“If you don't understand history, you're never going to understand trauma. And if you don’t understand trauma, you're never going to understand history. And this is part of our problem as a field,” said Dr. Bruce Perry in a June interview. He and “History. Culture. Trauma.” podcast hosts Ingrid Cockhren, CEO of PACEs Connection, and Mathew Portell, director of communities, discussed the intersecting fields of trauma and historical trauma and his best selling book, co-authored with Oprah...

Attachment & Trauma Network and the Alliance Against Seclusion and Restraint are excited to jointly host this all-day, virtual event on Friday, October 14, 2022 " We're offering this event NOW for this primary reason," explains Guy Stephens, AASR Founder and ED, "The past two years in education have been especially challenging. With the increase in stress, comes an increase of behaviors in the classroom. Traditional approaches to "managing" behaviors are failing...we all need help now!"...

[Editor's note: Dr. Harise Stein at Stanford University edits a web site — abuseresearch.info — that focuses on the effects of abuse, and includes research articles on PACEs. Every month, she posts the summaries of the abstracts and links to research articles that address only ACEs, PCEs and PACEs. Thank you, Harise!! — Rafael Maravilla] Brown J, Spiller V, Carter M, et. al. Fetal alcohol spectrum disorders (FASD) and youth firesetting: A call on criminal justice, emergency responder, and...

The "Great Resignation," "Quiet Quitting," and rising social awareness of historical racism have all brought attention to a common but frequently overlooked hazard of caregiving professions: Secondary Traumatic Stress (STS). In the execution of duties, professions that support our society with compassion and empathy can face traumatic stress from exposure to the experiences of the people that they are there to support. This stress can have deleterious physical and emotional consequences...

Here is an interesting OPED discussing violations of dignity as a core of violence of all types. Dignity and Conflict - Donna Hicks . It might be useful from the perspective of PACES to think of human dignity and its place in childhood experiences and in the lives of the adults children become. See attached paper on human dignity and childhood and how the dimensions of dignity identified by adult students are similar to those identified by Donna Hicks in global conflicts contexts.

By Anne Marshall-Chalmers, Photo: Katie Rodriguez/UC Berkeley Investigative Reporting Program, San Francisco Chronicle, September 24, 2022 Seven months ago, Betty Gray could climb the 11 inside steps leading to her Berkeley apartment, though it would take her about 15 minutes. In her 70s and suffering from chronic pain and congenital arthritis, she’d park her wheelchair at the bottom of the stairs and then scoot backward up each step. At the top, she’d pause before grasping the rail “for...

By Casey Parks, Photo: Ilana Panich-Linsman/The Washington Post, The Washington Post, September 23, 2022 The day after Texas Gov. Greg Abbott ordered the state’s Department of Family and Protective Services to “conduct a prompt and thorough investigation” of families with transgender children, the first case came up, and Morgan Davis’s name was on it. Davis was one of four investigators on a Travis County unit tasked with reviewing claims of child abuse. Usually, he and his colleagues took...

By Nigel Duara, Photo: Ben Margot/AP Photo, Cal Matters, September 26, 2022 In solitary confinement, a former California inmate recalled, there were two kinds of people: One kind would read books in their cells, exercise and do and re-do crossword puzzles. The other kind would scream and curse, refuse to dress and throw their feces at the walls. The goal in solitary confinement, he said, was to avoid becoming the second kind of inmate. “There’s one that’s resilient and one that’s not so...

By Hannah Schneider, Photo: Getty Images/LWA/Dann Tardif, Well+Good, September 25, 2022 hen you're pregnant, a full medical team is looking out for you and your baby. But after the baby arrives, most new parents go home with their newborn, some pamphlets and postpartum pads, and an ob/gyn appointment card for a few weeks. Support for new parents during the postpartum period—aka the "fourth trimester"—is far from robust. in the United States, postpartum medical care is "too limited to meet...

By Jillian McKoy, Photo: Screenshot from article, Boston University School of Public Health, October 1, 2022 Despite climate experts’ repeated warnings that extreme rainfall events will likely become more frequent and intense due to human-caused climate change, several US cities in the Northeast were caught off guard by the catastrophic rain that Hurricanes Henri and Ida dumped on the region in August. Both storms broke rainfall and flooding records in parts of New Jersey, Philadelphia, New...

By Wilfred Chan, Photo: Kemal Yildrim/Getty Images, The Guardian, September 22, 2022 J azmyne Casillas, 23, describes her mental health struggles as “pretty gnarly”. She has been diagnosed with autism, borderline personality disorder, comorbid with bipolar type 2, depression and anxiety. She also struggles with forming long-term memories. “There are cycles where things are going fine, but the moment I hit a depressive slump, my life and everything I do just goes down the drain,” she says.