Tagged With "mental health"
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Count your way to calm: A simple breathing technique to help you stay present (SDSU Student Health 101)
One of my favorite things about meditation is how uncomplicated the practice is. When my life gets hectic or my mind feels overrun with racing thoughts, the simplicity of meditation can be a huge relief. There’s a scientific basis for this feeling: Meditation reduces activity in parts of the brain associated with mind-wandering and unhappiness, according to a 2011 study in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences . When I teach meditation, I try to keep my instructions concise so as...
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Department of Counseling and Behavioral Health & Trauma Conference
Thomas Jefferson University's newly formed Department of Counseling and Behavioral Health has generated its first-ever newsletter . If you're interested in trauma-informed training and education , or if you simply want to stay abreast of the work of some great clinicians, researchers, advocates and aspiring professionals, please have a look. The Community and Trauma Counseling program currently has Art Therapy options and is launching two new specializations and certificates this summer: (1)...
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Doctor-patient role-playing featured in ACEs Connection webinar
On an ACEs Connection webinar on Monday, Dr. Andrew Seaman, an assistant professor at Oregon Health & Science University, showed how he navigates his students through the science of adverse childhood experiences (ACEs). And, in an unusual twist for a webinar, Seaman and O’Nesha Cochran, a peer mentor with the Mental Health Association of Oregon, role-played doctor-patient interactions to show how to develop the skills to communicate with patients with high ACE scores. About 90 people...
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Doctor-patient role-playing featured in ACEs Connection webinar
On an ACEs Connection webinar on Monday, Dr. Andrew Seaman, an assistant professor at Oregon Health & Science University, showed how he navigates his students through the science of adverse childhood experiences (ACEs). And, in an unusual twist for a webinar, Seaman and O’Nesha Cochran, a peer mentor with the Mental Health Association of Oregon, role-played doctor-patient interactions to show how to develop the skills to communicate with patients with high ACE scores. About 90 people...
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Economics Students Analyze Childhood-Trauma Data for Free Health Clinic [community.bowdoin.edu]
When professor John Fitzgerald asked students in his advanced economics class this semester —Economic Evaluation of Public Programs — whether any would like to volunteer, for no academic credit, to help a local healthcare clinic analyze some of its patient data, three students promptly signed up. Oasis Free Clinics was seeking help to compare information it had about some of its patients’ childhood histories — in particular, the traumas they may have experienced in youth — with information...
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Georgia Health Students Plan Trauma Informed Care Training Day, Oct. 19, 2019
Home to the Center for Disease Control, Atlanta is a city full of great minds focused on all issues related to public health. Despite this, a group of students and faculty at neighboring health professional schools including Emory School of Medicine, Emory’s Nell Hodgson Woodruff School of Nursing, Georgia State University, Morehouse School of Medicine, Mercer University School of Medicine, and the Medical College of Georgia at August University, found that education and awareness around one...
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Global Health Summit on Violence and Abuse at Florida State University
Dr. Vincent Felitti, author of the Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACE ) study, inspired the Young Parents Team by at the recent Global Health Summit on Violence and Abuse at Florida State University. Our team serves court-involved pregnant teens with histories of trauma, and often trafficking, to help cope and heal. We are grateful for Dr. Felitti’s research that guides our work to change the life trajectory for so many with ACEs. Thanks to FSU School of Social Work Dean James Clark and...
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Health status of adolescents reporting experiences of adversity [Global Pediatric Health]
Photo: Verkeorg/ creativecommons ______________________________________________________________ "This study examines relationships between adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) and adolescent health indicators among a sample of 8th, 9th, and 11th graders participating in the 2016 Minnesota Student Survey." Read more about this study in the journal Global Pediatric Health .
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How Parents Can Identify Mental Health Problems in Their College Kids [Health.USNews.com]
As a parent, you’ve watched your child grow from infancy to adolescence and now your son or daughter is entering a whole new world. While most kids will get through college just fine, others find themselves on a different, more precarious path. According to the latest results from the National College Health Assessment , many college students experience mental health difficulties. More than 1 in 5 felt overwhelming anxiety in the 12 months prior to the survey. In addition, 18 percent felt...
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How people cope with difficult life events fuels development of wisdom, study finds (oregonstate.edu)
How a person responds to a difficult life event such as a death or divorce helps shape the development of their wisdom over time, a new study from Oregon State University suggests. For many, the difficult life event also served to disrupt their sense of personal meaning, raising questions about their understanding of their world. These disruptions ultimately lead to the development of new wisdom, said Carolyn Aldwin , director of the Center for Healthy Aging Research in the College of Public...
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How We Build Resilience At College And At Home [forbes.com]
By Marvin Krislov, Forbes, August 27, 2019 There is a mental health crisis on America’s college campuses. Increasingly, today’s students are lonely. More and more of them are anxious. Many are experiencing depression. And that’s leading them to college counseling centers at ever-increasing rates. One major recent study showed that 75% of current college students say they need help for emotional or mental health problems. Most colleges and universities are determined to support their students...
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If You Feel Thankful, Write It Down. It's Good For Your Health (npr.org)
"I think just over the last few years there's been more of a trend to focus on gratitude," says psychologist Laurie Santos , who teaches a course on the science of well-being and happiness at Yale. Gratitude is being endorsed by wellness blogs and magazines . You can buy different kinds of specific gratitude journals, or download apps that remind you to jot down your blessings. And noting your gratitude seems to pay off: There's a growing body of research on the benefits of gratitude.
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Introducing NEW Becoming Trauma-Informed & Beyond Community
Earlier this year @Dawn Daum wrote to us when she was ready to share ACEs science with people in the organization she works in to make a case for moving towards more trauma-informed care for the benefit of the staff and those they serve. She was frustrated because almost all the training and resources she found were geared towards schools, clinical staff or to organizations working with children and families rather than ACE-impacted adults in the workplace and who are...
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Is There a Smarter Way to Think About Sexual Assault on Campus? [newyorker.com]
If I were asked by a survey to describe my experience with sexual assault in college, I would pinpoint two incidents, both of which occurred at or after parties in my freshman year. In the first case, the guy went after me with sniper accuracy, magnanimously giving me a drink he’d poured upstairs. In the second case, I’m sure the guy had no idea that he was doing something wrong. I had joined a sorority, and all my social circles were as sloppy, intense, and tribal as the Greek system—the...
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JED Foundation and UMass offer new guide: College to Career: Supporting Mental Health
"Investigators from The Jed Foundation (JED) and the University of Massachusetts Medical School examined the literature in education, business, psychology and sociology regarding the college-to-career transition. Knowledge gained informed a national survey of 1,929 college seniors, recent graduates and employers exploring specific challenges to the transition, as well as existing strategies to support young adults and their emotional health. Data from the literature review and the survey...
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Latest ACEs science research from PubMed, February 12, 2019
Hair cortisol in the perinatal period mediates associations between maternal adversity and disrupted maternal interaction in early infancy. Nyström-Hansen M, Andersen MS, Khoury JE, Davidsen K, Gumley A, Lyons-Ruth K, MacBeth A, Harder S. Dev Psychobiol . 2019 Feb 12. doi: 10.1002/dev.21833. [Epub ahead of print] PMID: 30747450 elect item 3074 Child maltreatment is mediating long-term consequences of household dysfunction in a population representative sample. Clemens V, Berthold O, Witt A,...
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Meeting the Growing Need for Behavioral Health Services on Campus [Blog.SAMHSA.gov]
Our nation’s college campuses are experiencing a surge in demand for mental health services. About 1 in 10 incoming freshmen reports feeling depressed frequently . The 2015 Annual Report for the Center for Collegiate Mental Health states that the use of college counseling centers grew by 30 percent , even though enrollment only increased by 5 percent. In addition, students’ concerns are increasingly complex. The percentage of students visiting college counseling centers who have a serious...
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Mental Health, Social Adversity, and Health-Related Outcomes in Sexual Minority Adolescents: A Contemporary National Cohort Study [thelancet.com]
By Background Sexual minority adolescents are more likely to have mental health problems, adverse social environments, and negative health outcomes compared with their heterosexual counterparts. There is a paucity of up-to-date population-level estimates of the extent of risk across these domains in the UK. We analysed outcomes across mental health, social environment, and health-related domains in sexual minority adolescents compared with their heterosexual counterparts in a large,...
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More Adolescents Seek Medical Care for Mental Health Issues [californiahealthline.org]
By Phillip Reese, California Healthline, November 11, 2019 Less than a decade ago, the emergency department at Rady Children’s Hospital in San Diego would see maybe one or two young psychiatric patients per day, said Dr. Benjamin Maxwell, the hospital’s interim director of child and adolescent psychiatry. Now, it’s not unusual for the emergency room to see 10 psychiatric patients in a day, and sometimes even 20, said Maxwell. “What a lot of times is happening now is kids aren’t getting the...
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NJ medical school program requires all first-year students to learn about ACEs science
In 2015, Dr. Beth Pletcher, a pediatrician and associate professor specializing in genetics, was at the annual conference of the American Academy of Pediatrics in Washington D.C. when she heard two speakers that forever changed her work with medical students. Dr. Beth Pletcher “I went to two talks on adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) that were so mind-boggling to me that I decided on my drive back to New Jersey that I had to do something about it,”says Pletcher, director of the Division...
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One university’s uniquely compassionate plan for teaching students resilience (qz.com)
In 2013, a group of top-flight colleges including Stanford, Harvard, Princeton and the University of Pennsylvania formed the Resilience Project to pool ideas and resources around building students’ coping skills, including Baylor’s workshop on cultivating grit and a Harvard group that encourages students to reflect on their beliefs about success and failure. Yale last year launched “ Psychology and the Good Life ,” a class about how to find happiness, while Bates is focused on helping...
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Parent Handouts updated and available In Dari, English & Spanish
The updated parent handouts are now available in Spanish as well as English and Dari. Here's the blog post with links to all three versions of each flyer. All versions of the Understanding ACEs and Parenting to Prevent & Heal ACEs parent handouts can be downloaded, distributed, and used freely. Both flyers were made with generous support from Family Hui, a Program of Lead for Tomorrow, who is responsible for making the Spanish and Dari translations available. These are updates of the...
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Peace4Tarpon and U.F. Make it Real Part 2
Peace4Tarpon has worked with University of Florida for several years now - specifically with the School of Public Health and Dr. Mark Hart's class on Public Health Communication. The subject of his Public Health Communications Master's level class for the past two semesters was Peace4Tarpon. He gave his students a chance to create marketing materials that would actually be implemented - a far cry from creating campaigns that might never see the light of day. We actually used the materials...
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Pennsylvania AG Josh Shapiro: “Protecting Students Is a Must” [phillymag.com]
On Monday night, Drexel University’s Creese Student Center was the site of the second roundtable discussion in Pennsylvania Attorney General Josh Shapiro ’s ongoing series on college campus safety. Shapiro launched the initiative in August with the broad goal of preventing drug and alcohol abuse, sexual assault, and tragedies stemming from mental health issues on the campuses of colleges and universities statewide. “When parents take their kids to college and drive off in their minivans, of...
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Ph.D. Students Face Mental Health Challenges
Science By Elisabeth Pain Approximately one-third of Ph.D. students are at risk of having or developing a common psychiatric disorder like depression, a recent study reports. Although these results come from a small sample—3659 students at universities in Flanders, Belgium, 90% of whom were studying the sciences and social sciences—they are nonetheless an important addition to the growing literature about the prevalence of mental health issues in academia . One key message for scientific...
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Press Release — New Survey of California Community College Students Reveals More than Half Face Food Insecurity and Nearly 20 Percent Have Faced Homelessness [California Community Colleges]
Press Release — New Survey of California Community College Students Reveals More than Half Face Food Insecurity and Nearly 20 Percent Have Faced Homelessness March 7, 2019 Sacramento — More than half the students attending a California community college have trouble affording balanced meals or worry about running out of food, and nearly 1 in 5 are either homeless or do not have a stable place to live, according to a survey released today. Click HERE to read the press release and click HERE...
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Professor uses her own ACEs story to teach med students how to help traumatized patients
When O’Nesha Cochran teaches medical residents about adverse childhood experiences in patients, she doesn’t use a textbook. Instead, the Oregon Health & Science University adjunct professor walks in the room, dressed in what she describes as the “nerdiest-looking outfit” she can find. And then she tells them her story. “My mom sold me to her tricks and her pimps from the age of three to the age of six,” she begins. “I could remember these grown men molesting me and my sisters. I have...
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Program gives Spokane schools resources to help students rise above adversity
By Jim Allen , Thu., Oct. 24, 2019 Think of it as a well-school checkup. On Tuesday morning at Bemiss Elementary School, educators and health professionals spoke enthusiastically about something called Resilience in School Environments, or RISE. A collaboration between Kaiser Permanente and the Spokane and West Valley school districts, the RISE program is expected to lift up teachers and administrators and give them tools to cope with all the challenges of the modern student. The challenges...
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Recently released research on ACEs; incarceration; separating families at the border
Behavioral risk factor surveillance system state survey on exposure to adverse childhood experiences (ACEs): Who declines to respond? [Children and Youth Services Review] "A wealth of research has examined the prevalence and impact of adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) via various research methodologies. Some of these studies have also examined the presence of nonresponse bias, showing minimal nonresponse bias effects. More recently, many states and the District of Columbia have used the...
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Red Flag Warning
Red Flag Warning In weather-speak, a red flag warning is issued when conditions are ripe for fire combustion. Many law enforcement officials in Florida have described school shooter Nikolas Cruz as displaying all the “red flags” of a troubled youth, yet no one seemed to speak up enough to prevent the tragedy at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida. This reflection extends writings I have recently done that describes trauma and traumatized systems as an invisible fire, an...
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Relationship between college, health in later life explored by researcher [news.wsu.edu]
There’s a familiar correlation in social science: more education is associated with increased health in society. Now a WSU researcher will use a new grant from the Evidence for Action Program of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation to examine whether more education can actually contribute to better health later in life. Ben Cowan, an associate professor in the School of Economic Sciences, leads the study with colleague Nathan Tefft at Bates College in Maine. Cowan said the dramatic increase in...
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Report: Solutions To Stop Sexual Violence Against Children [npr.org]
By Susan Brink, NPR.org, November 19, 2019 Sexual violence against children happens everywhere: in wealthy enclaves, in slums, in suburbs, in rural villages. Invariably, it happens in secret: in the privacy of family homes, in dark corners of schools and churches, and in murky shadows at neighborhood, community, sporting and scouting events. It happens often, and periodically groups put out reports to call attention to the issue. "That's usually where the story stops," says Daniela Ligiero,...
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Research Roundup: Looking at ACEs in vet students, college students, and the elderly
This is the extended ACEs Pyramid developed by RYSE in Richmond, CA. Here's an article about it . ____________________________________________ In a study of more than 1,000 veterinary students across six schools, 61% had at least one ACE, and those with four or more ACEs were three times more likely to be depressed. Among nearly 3,000 college students, ACEs were associated with increased odds of drug use in the previous 30 days. And In a group of women and men in Ireland aged 50-69, a higher...
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Resilient College Students
As a person with an ACE score of 9, I look back on the years that I did not function "normally." My freshman year of college . I could only imagine what life was like for the students that I saw a regular basis. My fabulous Intern from North Carolina Central University (NCCU) and my awesome CollegeTRY facilitator surveyed students about their level of RESILIENCE. They developed a forum with the assistance of the NCCU Department of Pubic Health Education. Resilient NCCU Video Achieving Health...
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Resource List - Trauma Informed Approaches and Autism Spectrum and Other Developmental Disabilities
Resources for individuals, organizations, and communities moving along trauma and hope-informed pathways in order to: Prevent and mitigate adverse childhood experiences (ACEs). Promote resilience and safe, stable, nurturing relationships and environments. Promote equity and racial justice. Prevent substance abuse and promote mental health. … so that all children, youth, families and communities have equal opportunity for educational success, economic stability, health, and well-being.
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Secondary students sharing their work to develop a trauma-informed university [APA November 2018 Newsletter]
Note from Karen: The American Psychological Association is dedicating their November Issue to ACEs related information. This is just one of several interesting articles. Check it out! The whole student: Understanding students through the intersections of their past and present contexts Secondary students sharing their work to develop a trauma-informed university. By Suzette Fromm Reed, PhD , and Claudia Pitts, PhD Two decades have passed since Felitti et al.’s (1998) foundational study on...
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Social support: The most overlooked self-care routine (SDSU Student Health 101)
I began feeling pretty out of it when I was 18. I had just started college after moving away from a tight-knit friend group in my hometown and had no idea what I wanted to do with my life. I’d come back from class, stuff my face with junk while binge-watching Netflix, and consciously try to shut out the world. It felt like I was slogging through mud just trying to get through each day. Despite how I was feeling, when family and friends would call to ask how I was doing, I always responded...
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Some 350 Florida Leaders Expected to Attend Think Tank with Dr. Vincent Felitti, Co-Principal Investigator of the ACE Study; Expert on ACEs Science
Leaders from across the Sunshine State will take part in a “Think Tank” in Naples, FL, on Monday, August 6, to help create a more trauma-informed Florida. The estimated 350 attendees will include policy makers and community teams made up of school superintendents, law enforcement officers, judges, hospital administrators, mayors, PTA presidents, child welfare experts, mental health and substance abuse treatment providers, philanthropists, university researchers, state agency heads, and...
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State profiles of ACEs initiatives debut! Use them as a new community building tool to accelerate your progress
Profiles of statewide and major local ACEs initiatives in the 50 states and the District of Columbia are now available from ACEs Connection. You’ll learn about other states and maybe even a few things about your own. This series is just the start of curating highlights of the most significant initiatives across the country. The next iteration will provide even more details. How to use this series: The invaluable information many of you provided to our ACEs Connection team on what is...
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SU College of Health and Human Services links a trio of majors
Recently I was reading the news and came across this article - Salisbury University is intentionally restructuring so that their schools of Nursing, Social Work and Health Sciences will become the College of Health and Human Services. What an incredible forward thinking idea of bringing this trio of complimentary areas of study under a shared mission / vision! Here is a bit more - a link to the article is at the bottom of this blog. Salisbury University announced a large strategic...
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Temporary Free Access to Paediatrics & Child Health (PCH) articles (Oxford Academic)
Temporary free access to highly cited articles making an impact in Paediatrics & Child Health ( PCH ) has just been opened up by Oxford Academic. If you're a research hoarder like me, you'll want to check this out. https://academic.oup.com/pch/pages/highly_cited_articles
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The College Mental Health Crisis in 10 Sketches (yesmagazine.org)
As schools respond to the 30 percent increase in demand for counseling, artist Ella Baron gives a glimpse inside some students’ experiences. Illustrator Ella Baron conducted a series of interviews with college students, many who had suspended their studies because of mental health concerns, to create a series of sketches about the mental health crisis at colleges, listening to the recordings as she drew. The images, published in June 2017 in The Guardian, are as pointed as they are...
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The Deepest Well reflections
My very first experience with ACEs came from watching Nadine Burke Harris’ Ted talk (Burke Harris, How trauma affects health across a lifetime, 2014). I’ve just read her book The Deepest Well (Burke Harris, 2018) and it is obvious to me how much she said in her Ted talk that I did not fully understand. Her book is an example of how a prepared mind gets prepared for learning something new. It is a narrative organized sequentially in time. It starts well before she encountered ACEs and shows...
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The First Graduate-Level Resilience Course in the Country
The University of Florida has fostered a strong relationship with Peace4Tarpon, through the College of Public Health and Health Professions, for a few years now. Recently, the conversations between the two were focused on how they could partner to take the aims and methods of the trauma-informed initiative beyond Tarpon Springs and into a more accessible, formal format. This sparked the idea to create a course available to learners who can take the information and spread the culture of...
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The long-term cost of college? For blacks and Hispanics, it’s not just about money (heraldsun.com)
College might be a ticket out of poverty, but for blacks and Hispanics making the climb, it might not be a ticket to good physical health, UNC-Chapel Hill researchers say. In fact, yardsticks like blood pressure and blood chemistry indicate students who start from “higher levels of disadvantage” may “actually experience a cost” to their future health from the stress surrounding the experience, a team led by post-doc Lauren Gaydosh and sociology professor Kathleen Mullan Harris said in a...
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The Most Anxious Generation Goes to Work (wsj.com)
New college graduates report higher levels of anxiety. How managers can help them steer past fear and improve work performance—and how young workers can work to calm their anxiety and be more effective. Michael Fenlon’s company is one of the nation’s biggest employers of newly minted college grads. He’s watching a tidal wave approach. College presidents and deans tell him repeatedly that they’ve had to make managing students’ anxiety and other mental-health issues a priority. “They’re...
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The University Elephant in the Room: Where’s Community Engagement Headed? (nonprofitquarterly.org)
The theme was lofty: True Stories of Engagement: Higher Education for Democracy . But bringing those words to life has not been easy, as became clear when more than 500 university staff and faculty gathered at Campus Compact’s biennial conference in Indianapolis last month to discuss the state of the field of community engagement in higher education. For the uninitiated, Campus Compact is a national organization dedicated to promoting community engagement by universities. The organization...
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Toxic Stress: Issue Brief on Family Separation and Child Detention [immigrationinitiative.harvard.edu]
By Jack P. Shonkoff, Immigration Initiative at Harvard, October 2019 Background The separation of children from their parents and their prolonged detention for an indefinite period of time raise profound concerns that transcend partisan politics and demand immediate resolution. Forcibly separating children from their parents is like setting a house on fire. Preventing rapid reunification is like blocking the first responders from doing their job. And subjecting children to prolonged...
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Trauma-Informed Care as a Universal Precaution: Beyond the Adverse Childhood Experiences Questionnaire [jamanetwork.com]
By Nicole Racine, Teresa Killam, and Sheri Madigan, JAMA Pediatrics, November 4, 2019 Experiences of childhood adversity are common, with more than 50% of adults reporting having experienced at least 1 adversity as children and more than 6% exposed to 4 or more adverse childhood experiences (ACEs). There is currently a controversial debate in the medical field as to whether the ACEs questionnaire, which asks about abuse, neglect, and household dysfunction before age 18 years, should be...
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Trauma-Informed Classrooms: Educator Self-Care
Working in a school is hard. It doesn’t matter if you work in a suburban, urban, or rural area. It doesn’t matter if you work with 5 year-olds on building empathy, teach 11 year-olds about symbiosis, coach teachers in aligning curriculum, or help high school seniors choose their postsecondary pathways. It is hard work. From the cacophony of lockers closing at dismissal, to the challenge of getting 25 sets of 8 year-old eyes looking at you in synchrony, schools are a special kind of organized...