Blog

For the past year I was looking for the most effective way to talk about traumatic nature of mental illness, trauma psychology, adverse childhood experience and what it does as well as my personal experience of living with the stigma of mental disability. I tried to write for a local newspaper and sent my writings to several other places. On Our Own of Maryland created a workshop where C Frazer Smith told us how be a 20th century "typewriter age" journalist. I found that writing has a very...

PACEs Connection Presentations Tracker is an extremely useful tool for local PACEs initiatives to measure their progress as they educate their community about PACEs science. It maps PACEs Science presentations that your PACEs initiative has made. It tracks: who did the presentation, to what organization, when the presentation took place, how many people attended identifies the sector and subsector of those attending. Your initiative can make sure it's tailoring its outreach efforts across...

The PACEs Connection Milestones Tracker is a good starting point to assess your organization and particularly your community’s progress in integrating policies and practices based on PACEs science. Less an assessment tool and more of a checklist or roadmap, it identifies the general steps that any organization can use to determine if it’s on the right track, whether a school, police department, business, healthcare facility, or social services agency. We chose the 14 milestones based on an...

While Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) can potentially increase a company’s profit over time, CSR is best demonstrated with dramatic improvement in the lives of employees who have suffered from Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs).

In the current polarized political environment, it is no small feat for a bill to be introduced with bipartisan support in both chambers—a fact that bodes well for the future of the “Resilience Investment, Support, and Expansion (RISE) from Trauma Act of 2019.” Identical bills titled “The RISE from Trauma Act of 2019” were introduced in the Senate and the House on June 10, with bipartisan support from members of Congress representing diverse states, districts, and constituencies. While...

In this interview, we spoke about a wide variety of topics, ranging from how he believes that most mental health conditions originate from unresolved childhood trauma, to why he describes current Western culture as ‘insane’ because of its failure to meet basic human needs. He went into detail about what he sees as the root causes of conditions such as anxiety, panic attacks and fibromyalgia. We also spoke about the process of reconnecting with your authentic self. The origin of the word...

By Sarah Holder, Pacific Standard, June 26, 2019. Each year, about 40,000 people in Essex County, New Jersey, get evicted. Almost half of them are in the city of Newark, where more than three-quarters of the population are renters. As housing in Newark, spiked by a surge in interest from priced-out Manhattanites , grows more expensive, evictions keep getting filed—"sometimes arbitrarily; sometimes because of poor management," said Newark's mayor, Ras Baraka, who's trying to balance his...

Domestic violence survivors commonly suffer repeated blows to the head and strangulation, trauma that has lasting effects that should be widely recognized by advocates, health care providers, law enforcement and others who are in a position to help, according to the authors of a new study. In the first community-based study of its kind, researchers from The Ohio State University and the Ohio Domestic Violence Network found that 81 percent of women who have been abused at the hands of their...

By K. Hecht & A. Hosack & P. Berman I have worked hard to help myself and Davy. I can feel good about that, despite my mistakes. Claire has been thinking a lot about her decisions. The good ones like accepting help from people like the Carsons. The bad ones, like allowing Larry to dominate her thinking- despite his lack of good judgment. Dr. Berman had talked to her a lot about paying more attention to what she was doing right and forgiving herself for what she hadn’t. It was hard.

As threats of deportation continue to rattle immigrant communities, advocates and attorneys in the Washington area say they have seen a marked increase in undocumented victims of domestic violence choosing not to pursue legal recourse against their abusers. Many victims are reluctant to even start the legal process, experts say, concerned that police will turn them over to federal immigration authorities or that their partners will retaliate by revealing their immigration status. In a 2018...

By Amy Reid, Santiago Nariño, Hema Magge & Angelina Sassi, Standford Social Innovation Review, June 25, 2019. For more than 25 years, the Institute for Healthcare Improvement (IHI) has used improvement science to advance quality and safety and to sustain better outcomes in health and health systems globally. In particular, IHI understands that quality healthcare is impossible without equity and that racism and white supremacy persist around the world. To illustrate our approach to these...

By Lauren Smith, FSG, June 26, 2019. Everything I have learned in my almost three decades as a pediatrician and public health advocate caring for children and families tells me that what we are doing to migrant children at the border is morally and medically wrong. It goes against all that we know about how children should be treated. It is also not who we aspire to be as a nation. We are and must be better than this. Recent detailed reports of the appalling conditions in the detention...