Blog

Please join us on June 28 from 1:30-3:00 p.m. ET for a virtual conversation with best-selling author Bruce Perry. Ingrid Cockhren , CEO of PACEs Connection; Mathew Portell , PACEs Connections’ director of communities, and Perry, a psychiatrist and neuroscientist, will engage in a conversation concerning historical trauma and Perry’s best-selling book " What Happened to You? Conversations on Trauma, Resilience and Healing, " which he co-authored with Oprah Winfrey. Please share this blog...

Has the pandemic stressed you out? Want to learn the self-soothing skills of Mind Matters: Overcoming Adversity and Building Resilience directly from the author, Dr. Carolyn Curtis? Good news! The Dibble Institute has received generous funding for scholarships to the online, full 12-lesson series, Mind Matters Now . The course helps teachers, social workers, medical professionals, and others manage their stress by building resilience skills and practices for mental well-being. (CEU’s are...

By Kassie McClung, Photo: The Frontier, Center for Health Journalism, December 6, 2021 Laughter filled the living room of Carmen and Daniel Gibson’s second-floor apartment in Tulsa as they practiced swaddling a baby doll, gently wrapping it in a white blanket. Their doula, Ashlee Wilson, sat nearby and offered advice and words of encouragement. “So, the first thing is, it doesn’t have to be perfect, right,” Wilson said as Daniel carefully crossed a corner of the blanket over the doll. “A...

By Mary Beth Maslowski, Psychiatry Advisor, December 9, 2021 US Surgeon General Vivek H. Murthy issued a public health advisory on Tuesday, December 6, 2021 in order to provide recommendations for how to address the mental health challenges confronting children, adolescents, and young adults, which have been exacerbated by the COVID pandemic. The advisory, issued by the Office of the Surgeon General, speaks about actions that various groups, such as, family members, community organizations,...

Self-Care and Its Importance for Relationship Intense Fields Self-care is incredibly important for new members in the counseling field, and overall for any field that is relationship intense. A relationship intense field is any field that requires the practitioner to form a strong relationship or bond with their client in order to complete their job. Examples of these positions are; nurses, counselors, teachers, healthcare providers, or social workers. Self-care is a part of creating a...

Please join us for our new series entitled: Trauma-Informed Criminal Justice. This monthly virtual Zoom series will feature conversations facilitated by Dr. Porter Jennings-McGarity, PhD/LCSW, PACEs Connection’s criminal justice consultant, with special guests to discuss the need for trauma-informed criminal justice system reform. Using a PACEs-science lens, this series will examine the relationship between trauma and the criminal justice system, what needs changing, and strategies being...

The California Children’s Trust, in partnership with the National Center for Youth Law , and with guidance and funding from the California Health Care Foundation and Hopelab , is excited to release School Mental Health 101: A Primer for Medi-Cal Managed Care Plans. The goal of the primer is to facilitate effective partnerships between Managed Care Plans (MCPs) and schools to better address the well-documented and growing mental health crisis among school-age youth. California’s $4 billion...

Growing up, I was taught that traditional male attributes are things like toughness, emotional reserve, strength, power, and staunch individualism. This image of a “traditional man” feeds into once-clear-cut roles like winner and provider . Edward M. Adams and Ed Frauenheim suggest that this version of masculinity is confined : both limited and limiting. In their 2020 book, Reinventing Masculinity , Adams and Frauenheim write, “Confined masculinity focuses more on a man’s sense of...

By Darby Saxbe and Sofia Cardenas, The New York Times, November 8, 2021 After President Biden left paid family leave out of his Build Back Better Act last month, a familiar marshaling of forces took place. Women’s groups and female leaders protested. Senator Patty Murray of Washington said Democrats should not “tell all the women in this country that they can’t have paid leave.” Democratic leaders, well aware that women are the base of the party, have restored four weeks of family leave, at...

Discussions about Indigenizing the academy have abounded in Canada over the past few years. And yet, despite the numerous policies and reports that have been written, there is a lack of clarity around what pedagogical methods could help to decolonize our institutions. In Sharing Breath: Embodied Learning and Decolonization , edited by Sheila Batacharya and Yuk-Lin Renita Wong, contributors demonstrate how the academy cannot be decolonized while we still subscribe to the Western idea of mind...

The Dibble Institute is pleased to present an introductory webinar by Rev. Dr. Bryant T. Marks Sr. of the National Training Institute on Race and Equity , which will provide foundational information on implicit bias. It will focus at the individual level and discuss how implicit bias affects everyone. Strategies to reduce or manage implicit bias will be discussed. Broadly speaking, group-based bias involves varying degrees of stereotyping (exaggerated beliefs about others), prejudice...

Of all the sad statistics the U.S. has dealt with this past year and a half, here is a particularly difficult one: A new study estimates that more than 140,000 children in the U.S. have lost a parent or a grandparent caregiver to COVID-19. The majority of these children come from racial and ethnic minority groups. "This means that for every four COVID-19 deaths, one child was left behind without a mother, father and/or a grandparent who provided for that child's home needs and nurture —...