Blog

Victor J. Dzau, M.D., Darrell Kirch, M.D., and Thomas Nasca, M.D. August 6, 2020 N Engl J Med 2020; 383:513-515. DOI: 10.1056/NEJMp2011027. The Covid-19 pandemic, which had killed more than 60,000 Americans by May 1, has been compared with Pearl Harbor and September 11 — cataclysmic events that left indelible imprints on the U.S. national psyche. Like the volunteers who flooded into Manhattan after the World Trade Center attacks, the health care providers working on the front lines of the...

The organization Zero To Three estimates that in the U.S., a child is taken into the child welfare system every six seconds. “Many of society’s most intractable problems can be traced back to childhood adversity. Being in the child welfare system increases the likelihood of more adversity and criminality. Baby court is a proven approach to healing the trauma of both child and parent, and breaking the cycle of maltreatment,” says Mimi Graham, Ed.D ., director of the Florida State University...

By Rachel K. Walker, July 23, 2020, Medium. In recent weeks, professional nursing organizations such as ANA, AACN, Sigma Nursing, ONS, AAN, APHA and NLN released statements of solidarity voicing an “[end] hatred, discrimination, and racism in every form.” Some of these organizational statements were more direct than others. Practically none but the Nursology Theory Collective provided a description of specific resource investments or other steps being taken towards greater accountability to...

By Michael Lewis, July 30, 2020, Bloomberg. Notes From A Pandemic: A California county’s efforts to stop the spread has also become a battle with the public’s denial. Erica Dykehouse will wait for minds to change. The Humboldt County Public Health department in California is inside what used to be a juvenile jail. The offices are former prison cells. A few of the doors still have the small windows with the sliding panels that allowed guards to observe prisoners. The basement is a dungeon,...

By Ryan White, Center for Health Journalism, July 23, 2020 Harvard’s Jack Shonkoff, a luminary in the field of early childhood, has spent years showing that events in the earliest years of life have profound implications for how budding brains develop, and in turn, shape a child’s later potential at school and work. Now, Shonkoff says it’s time to connect the brain to the rest of the body. “The message now is to say that there is a revolution going on in molecular biology and genomics and in...

“In order to cope,” writes Mary Trump, “Donald began to develop powerful but primitive defenses, marked by an increasing hostility to others and a seeming indifference to his mother’s absence and father’s neglect….In place of [his emotional needs] grew a kind of grievance and behaviors—including bullying, disrespect, and aggressiveness—that served their purpose in the moment but became more problematic over time. With appropriate care and attention, they might have been overcome.”

By Andrea Blanch, Sarasota Herald-Tribune, July 27, 2020 People are really stressed out right now. A recent national survey reports that “serious psychological distress” — the kind that can lead to longer-term psychiatric disorders — has more than tripled since this time last year. We are already seeing the consequences in Sarasota County, with the number of opioid-related deaths in the first half of 2020 more than double the number in all of 2019. And based on experience with SARS, experts...

By Danielle Roubinov, Nicole R. Bush, and W. Thomas Boyce, JAMA Pediatrics, July 27, 2020 The reach of the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic is global, a health crisis with a ubiquity never before experienced. While the physical health consequences of COVID-19 appear to affect proportionally fewer children compared with adults, its psychosocial consequences may be magnified within families who consistently weather a landscape of severe stressors or adverse childhood experiences...

Gynecological problems as a result of ACEs, and particularly of Childhood Sexual Abuse (CSA), are rarely discussed in books and articles about the ACEs. The author would like to see that issue become part of the ACEs conversation.

By Nora K. Moog, MSc, Claudia Buss, PhD, [...], and Pathik D. Wadhwa, MD, PhD, Biol Psychiatry. 2016 May 15; PMCID: PMC4777678. The effects of exposure to childhood trauma (CT) may be transmitted across generations, however the time period(s) and mechanism(s) have yet to be clarified. We address the hypothesis that intergenerational transmission may begin during intrauterine life via the effect of maternal CT exposure on placental-fetal stress physiology, specifically placental...

By Mallory Moench, San Francisco Chronicle, July 21, 2020 Dr. Robert Rodriguez’s anxiety rises and falls with the number of coronavirus cases and deaths. Fear that he could get infected at his San Francisco General Hospital job, or bring the virus home, affects his sleep. He doesn’t hug his 16-year-old son as much. Other worried family members avoid interacting with him. The stress isn’t sustainable, he said. “If day after day, you’re waking up and dealing with patients that are extremely...

By Sara Gottfried, Dr. Sara Gottfried MD, July 13, 2020 I take respectful care of my patients regardless of skin color, but in the past few years, I’ve realized that is not enough. There are many sources of information that have influenced me. Conversations, particularly a recent interview with integrative physician Andrea Pennington MD. Books, mentioned in this article, including How to Be an Antiracist by Boston University Professor Ibram X. Kendi and founder of the Antiracism Center for...