Thank you for the opportunity to be a part of such an important group of individuals, I'd like to introduce myself. My name is Laura Mayo. I am the mother of a 10 year old son, Riese. Together we are survivors of alcoholic domestic violence, for me it...
This research has huge implications for ACE-, trauma-informed and resilience-building work around the globe. Although , so far, ACE surveys from different countries and on different sub-populations are finding similar results to the CDC's ACE Study...
Dawn Post, co-borough director of the Brooklyn, NY, office of the Children's Law Center (CLC), a non-profit law firm providing representation to over 10,000 children per year in the nation's busiest Family Court system, wrote this essay for...
When school systems across the country adopted zero tolerance policies in the 1990s, "willful defiance" became the No. 1 reason for suspensions, and launched students, especially minority students, into the school-to-prison pipeline. California is...
Thanks to Martha Davis for pointing out this essay on the Daily Good, which republished Carolyn Gregoire's fine post on Huffington Post. Gregoire provides the details of the seven habits of highly resilient people. Here are two: They fully experience...
Walla Walla Union-Bulletin reporter Ben Wentz wrote this long feature about Jim Sporleder, former principal of Lincoln High School, and a member of ACEsConnection. It's well worth a read. Here's the beginning: He gave too much. Those were the...
A Prospective Study of Posttraumatic Stress Disorder Symptoms and Weight Status in Women Experience of PTSD symptoms is associated with an increased risk of becoming overweight or obese, and PTSD symptom onset alters BMI trajectories over time. The...
In an analysis of 20,000 people, about half of which were severely mentally ill, researchers found: In the severely mentally ill group -- 30 percent engaged in binge drinking, 75 percent smoked cigarettes, 50 percent used marijuana, half used other...
Most of this article tells the story of a woman who'd been stabbed to death by her partner. Way down in the story is the information -- all of it, below -- about how police officers in Columbus will be trained to do a lethality assessment. To be more...
For the past 50 years, psychotherapy has taken a back seat to biomedical psychiatry, largely due to reliance on medications for the treatment of mental disorders. Yet clinical evidence increasingly points to chronic, unresolved traumatic stress as the...
Psychiatrist and novelist Scott Mendelson wrote this essay for Huffington Post about the effects of child abuse on the brain, and why those who have been abused have an over-amped stress response. A study published in 2009 in the prestigious...
This New York Times story can provide an opportunity to look at a child's normal response to toxic stress in a different way, and to help parents who are inadvertently passing on their own adverse childhood experiences to obtain assistance for...
This is an op-ed piece that addresses a mandatory child-abuse reporting campaign in Great Britain. The campaign for new legislation – dubbed the ‘Daniel Pelka’ law – has been led by Mandate Now, a coalition of charities...
Psychiatrist Mohamed Khalil says it isn’t unusual for refugee kids from the two-and-half year Syrian civil war to draw weapons and to veer from hyperactivity to withdrawal. Khalil says the region is engulfed in a public health crisis that is...