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America is suffering an epidemic of loneliness. According to a recent large-scale survey from the health care provider Cigna, most Americans suffer from strong feelings of loneliness and a lack of significance in their relationships. Nearly half say they sometimes or always feel alone or “left out.” Thirteen percent of Americans say that zero people know them well. The survey, which charts social isolation using a common measure known as the U.C.L.A. Loneliness Scale, shows that loneliness...

Executive function and self-regulation skills are like an air traffic control system in the brain—they help us manage information, make decisions, and plan ahead. We need these skills at every stage of life, and while no one is born with them, we are all born with the potential to develop them. But, how do we do that? The Center on the Developing Child created this Guide to Executive Function to walk you through everything you need to know about these skills and how to develop and practice...

Early identification of trauma exposure and treatment of traumatic stress is critical to a child’s lifelong health and well-being. Exposure to trauma is common, with approximately 71% of all children exposed to violence, abuse, or other forms of trauma by 17 years of age. 1 Trauma exposure places children at increased risk for a host of developmental, behavioral health, and health problems. For example, childhood trauma exposure is associated with traumatic stress (including post-traumatic...

In 2014, Slate published ten photographs from a work in progress by the artist Brenda Ann Kenneally, documenting the lives of a group of twenty-first-century American teen-agers in Troy, a city in upstate New York. The subjects in her images were not doing much: in one, an obese teen-age boy lay on a mattress in a homeless shelter, disconsolate; an exhausted child at a kitchen table waited for his bottle to be filled with coffee, his favorite drink; a young woman named Kayla, one of...

What does it take to realize the vision of health, safety, and wellbeing for all? Drawing from successful initiatives that dramatically increased the length and quality of people’s lives, Prevention Institute developed the System of Preventionframework to support health leaders and their partners to delve into systems-level work as they innovate, build practice, advance policy and systems changes, and generate momentum for comprehensive prevention and health equity. Now available in print...

This article is not meant to be political. It attempts to be a factual and functional approach to understanding and recovering from our national trauma. The fact is that we in the U.S. are living in a nation that is increasingly traumatized by the malignant, narcissistic rhetoric of its leadership and the shocking natural disasters and human violence that it minimizes and evades. Traumatized people are frozen in their fearful feelings of hopelessness, helplessness and pathetic dependency. As...

When Tiffany Harris and her two children emerged from their hotel after Hurricane Michael roared past, her 3-year-old son pointed to a sea of fallen trees and shattered buildings. "It's broken. It's broken, Mommy, fix it," she recalls her little boy Amari begging. Harris, who lives with her boyfriend, two children, plus her sister and her four children near Panama City, soon learned their town house was uninhabitable. Everything was a total loss after Michael powered inland across the...

In a recent chapel time, our children were given the opportunity to "pay if forward" by helping create the video below. You see, part of the lesson was about thanksgiving and generosity, and that generosity is NOT just about sharing money. It's about being the type of people who share compassion and the wisdom that has been gained through difficulty. The children were encouraged to know that they could help other children handle their big feelings in healthy ways by sharing what they had...

A traumatic event or another crisis can act as the catalyst to cause or exacerbate an already upside down hierarchy. Over time, this inverted hierarchy will lead the problem symptoms in the child and/or other family members, a lack of boundaries, coalitions, or a lack of love or limits. On Tuesday, December 11 at 1 pm ET, the Family Trauma Institute presents a webinar that answers the question: "Why is theory so essential to helping the trauma therapist know where to tap to discover the root...

Gregory Williams, PhD, will help change the world by taking this book into medical schools and teaching physicians and nurses about the root cause of most adult illness: childhood trauma. I just read this book in one sitting, save one hot tea refill. I could not stop reading it. Even though there were some passages that evoked anxiety, I couldn’t stop reading it, as I so wanted to learn more about this remarkable man and how he earned a PhD, had a normal family life, and earned the respect...

In 2019, more than $40 million will become available to fund community-based, culturally rooted, trauma-informed services for youth in California as alternatives to arrest and incarceration. Thousands of California youth are arrested every year for low-level offenses. Youth who are arrested or incarcerated for low-level offenses are less likely to graduate high school, more likely to suffer negative health-outcomes, and more likely to have later contact with the justice system.

Overdose deaths in Montgomery County (OH), anchored by Dayton, have plunged this year, after a stretch so bad that the coroner’s office kept running out of space and having to rent refrigerated trailers. The county had 548 overdose deaths by Nov. 30 last year; so far this year there have been 250 , a 54 percent decline. .... When Sam Quinones, the author of “Dreamland: The True Tale of America’s Opiate Epidemic,” testified before Congress earlier this year, he said that “the more cops and...