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The March meeting of the New Jersey Education Association’s ACEs Task Force opened without an agenda. It was a virtual gathering with more than 50 people—educators, social workers, professionals in pediatrics, juvenile justice and child abuse prevention. The pandemic had landed emphatically close to home, with a governor’s order to close all schools on March 18, and participants were grappling with what that meant for their students, their families and themselves. So ACEs Task Force co-chair...

By Randi B. Hagi Across video conference screens, Strategies for Trauma Awareness and Resilience Lead Trainer Katie Mansfield and Kirby Broadnax MA ’20 sit down together. Their topic of discussion: learning from our pain. “For me, there’s not a moment or a particular event that I think about, but just a continual deepening of my understanding of the ways that structural traumas like racism and sexism in particular, have impacted, continue to impact my life and my body,” Broadnax says. “So...

By Ty Bechel, August 31, 2020, riverbend.com. There are many elements to drug and alcohol addiction. One of the most heartbreaking and gut-wrenching elements is trauma. I have worked with individuals struggling with drug and alcohol addiction for nearly five years. If you heard some of the trauma people had to experience, you would want to escape reality, too. Sexual abuse, physical abuse, or neglect are just a few forms of trauma some human beings have had to forcefully experience. Yes,...

The desire to see other ACEs initiatives grow and flourish was evident at a recent meeting of the Resilient Columbus County (North Carolina) ACEs initiative when Mebane Boyd, executive director of the New Hanover Resiliency Task Force (also in North Carolina), shared with the Columbus County and neighboring Pender County groups how New Hanover created and works on its strategic plan. In the spirit of sharing, Boyd agreed to let ACEs Connection post the strategic plan and the video of the...

By Debbie Elliott, National Public Radio, August 30, 2020 DEBBIE ELLIOTT, HOST: As parts of the Gulf Coast are starting to pick up the pieces left in the wake of Hurricane Laura, we look back at another catastrophic hurricane that made landfall 15 years ago - Katrina. The Category 5 storm killed more than a thousand people and caused major damage. Eighty percent of New Orleans was underwater after the federal levee protection system failed. While the city was able to rebuild, many of its...

From The Center for Public Integrity, EcoWatch, August 30, 2020 Disasters are stressful. Our warming world keeps adding fuel to the fires — and floods and hurricanes, among other calamities. What can be done about the trauma that follows? The Center for Public Integrity, Columbia Journalism Investigations and our partners in newsrooms around the country have been reporting on this for months. We've learned a lot by asking experts: people who've lived through disasters and the professionals...

By John Rich, USA Today, August 30, 2020 As a primary care doctor in Boston in the late 1990s and early 2000s, I saw many young Black men who were injured by violence. But one young man stands out in my mind. The first time I saw him, he was lying in a hospital bed sweating and writhing in pain. Like many young men I saw as a doctor in an urban medical center, and despite what I – and many of my colleagues – might have assumed, this young man had done nothing to provoke the attack. Rather,...

By Larry Gordon, Ed Source, August 31, 2020 With surveys showing that the pandemic is worsening anxiety and depression among college students, campus counseling centers across California are bracing for an expected sharp rise in the numbers of students seeking mental health services. Like most college and university classes, psychological therapy sessions switched to online — or on telephone — in March. The campuses say they will try their best to advertise, expand and improve those virtual...

By Vanessa Grubbs, California Health Care Foundation, August 4, 2020 It was the Black woman’s third trip to the emergency department because she was feeling short of breath. She was starting to panic. She knew the COVID-19 death toll was climbing and that it was far worse for Black people than white people , and yet the doctors told her to go home again. But this time she pleaded, “If you all don’t admit me to the hospital, I’m going to die. I can’t breathe.” This is the story told by Sheila...

By Anna Printess, August 31, 2020, Florida State University News. Florida State University’s College of Social Work recently launched a new level in its successful Professional Certification in Trauma and Resilience online series. The curriculum series, developed by the Clearinghouse on Trauma and Resilience within the college’s Institute for Family Violence Studies in conjunction with the FSU Center for Academic and Professional Development , enables professionals to develop the knowledge...

Dear Pete, I read your blog post, “Influential Critic D. J. Jaffe Has Died: Remembered As “Bomb Thrower” Who Demanded Mental Illness Reforms” and thought of how he has done so much to hurt those of us labeled “mentally ill”. You considered him a friend, he was anything but for those of us struggling with the challenges of trauma, abuse and mental health concerns. These are some of my thoughts on D.J. Jaffe. He did not have the best interests of people struggling despite all of his rhetoric,...

ACEs Connection is a great resource for pooling knowledge – there are experts here across many fields including psychology, social work, and addiction. With so many experts on substance abuse and addiction, we want to know: w hat makes an addiction rehab ‘ the best ’ ? I work for The Hope House , a drug and alcohol recovery center recently named one of the best rehabs in Scottsdale , Arizona, according to Expertise . We are honored to be recognized for this and we firmly believe we are an...