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Imagine identifying a toxin so potent it could rewire a child’s brain and erode his immune system. A substance that, in high doses, tripled the risk of heart disease and lung cancer and reduced life expectancy by 20 years. And then realizing that tens of millions of American children had been exposed. Dr. @Nadine Burke Harris, California’s newly appointed surgeon general, will tell you this is not a hypothetical scenario. She is a leading voice in a movement trying to transform our...

In sixth grade, I went on a field trip to jail. Picture us: a bunch of Latino and African American kids sitting in a prison cell. I’ve never been able to shake the memory. Here I was, an 11-year-old Latina from Jersey City, and our teachers were telling us, dead straight: This could be your future. I certainly got the message. What haunts me is how easily everyone could picture us behind bars. We could picture it, too. When it came time for high school, my dad made the decision to move us to...

States have never found so many homeless students in public schools before. The next challenge will be finding ways to keep those students in school long enough to earn a diploma. Nearly 1.36 million children—more than all the students in New York City—went to school in 2017 without knowing where they would sleep at night, finds a new report by the national campaign Education Leads Home , which looked at new national data as well as graduation rates for homeless students in 26 states. That's...

Approximately one in five youths ages 13-18 experiences a severe mental disorder at some point during their life, according to the National Alliance on Mental Illness. For children ages 8-15, the number is 13%. The AAP Arizona, California 3, Florida, New Jersey and Virginia chapters received Healthy People 2020 grants to develop programs to empower families, the media and/or communities to address the mental health crisis in children and youths. Following is an overview of each chapter’s...

In 2017, Dr. Audrey Stillerman and three other women from the Chicago healthcare community founded the THEN Center . Its goal is lofty: By 2025, it wants every graduating student in medical and health sciences across the United States to apply core concepts of childhood adversity, neurobiology, resilience and health equity into their work. Dr. Audrey Stillerman Today, the THEN Center (The Collaborative Study of Trauma, Health Equity and Neurobiology) is well on its way. Its founders are...

The American Psychologist journal published a new special issue that features the latest psychological research on racial trauma. Feminist psychologist and clinical practitioner, Dr. Lillian Comas-Díaz and her colleagues, introduced the special issue and its mission to foreground novel conceptual models of racial trauma, promote healing on individual and collective levels, and highlight consideration of historical racial injuries. The special issue provides a contemporary examination of...

Great new Resource from CDC shared with me from Dr. Kevin Sherin, Health Officer & Director of Florida Department of Health in Orange County, Florida. Welcome to the Connections Selector! This tool makes it easier for you to connect the dots and explore the relationships between multiple types of violence and the risk and protective factors they share at each level of the social-ecological model (SEM). A clear understanding of these connections can help you plan strategies to prevent...

Newcomer immigrant youth – refugees, asylum seekers, and unaccompanied children – face unique challenges when involved with the juvenile justice system, say a team of mental health and legal experts who have published a new book on the topic. Co-authored by UConn Health psychiatrist Julian Ford, the book seeks to raise awareness about those challenges among some of the first people that the youth will meet: juvenile court judges and advocates. In A Trauma-Informed Approach to Judicial...

A new program for parents and infants, thanks to generous support from Mill Town Capital , is coming to Pittsfield, Massachusetts. The Hello It’s Me Project shines a spotlight on these tender new relationships, investing resources around the birth of a baby with the long-term goal of building a healthy community from the bottom up. When world-renowned child development researcher Dr. Ed Tronick spoke in the spring of 2018 for an audience of a wide variety of practitioners in Berkshire County...

A new program for parents and infants, thanks to generous support from Mill Town Capital , is coming to Pittsfield, Massachusetts. The Hello It’s Me Project shines a spotlight on these tender new relationships, investing resources around the birth of a baby with the long-term goal of building a healthy community from the bottom up. When world-renowned child development researcher Dr. Ed Tronick spoke in the spring of 2018 for an audience of a wide variety of practitioners in Berkshire County...

US-based pediatrician Nadine Burke-Harris had a glut of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) cases at the clinic where she worked in Bayview, a poor area in San Francisco. She felt in her bones that these cases didn’t come out of the blue, and were directly linked to high levels of toxic stress in the community. Toxic stress, experienced through consistent exposure to violence, abuse and the consequences of poverty and inequality, has a lasting effect on the brain, notably in the...

OBJECTIVES: Our purpose in this study was to adapt and validate the Traumatic Events Screening Inventory (TESI) as a primary-care childhood adversity screening tool for children living in vulnerable neighborhoods using a community-partnered approach. METHODS: In this cross-sectional, descriptive study, we used a sample of 261 children (3–16 years old) who were seeking services at a Federally Qualified Health Center with colocated behavioral health services in Chicago and had a positive...