Blog

By Peter Sullivan, The Hill, January 7, 2020 A new study finds that Medicaid expansion improved people’s health in Southern states, resulting in fewer declines in people’s health. The study published in Health Affairs finds that Medicaid expansion made declines in health status 1.8 percentage points less likely in states that expanded the medical coverage. It examined 12 Southern states, including those that have accepted the expansion of Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act, like...

By Shannon Green, The Orlando Sentinel, January 3, 2020 Are you going to be OK, mom? Shibbon Winelle said those were among the final words uttered by her son, Bryce Gowdy, before he left their motel room and stood in front of a freight train. Bryce, who was 17, died of suicide a week before the Deerfield Beach football star was due to start classes at Georgia Tech on a scholarship Jan. 6. Bryce, his mom and his brothers were homeless again, and family members said he wrestled with his...

By Alan R. Weil, Health Affairs, December 9, 2019 This month’s Health Affairs explores many dimensions of health and health care for the one out of five Americans who live in what the US Census Bureau defines as a rural area. Much attention is focused these days on the relatively poor health outcomes and heightened rate of socioeconomic disadvantage of rural America. As Janice Probst and colleagues point out in their overview paper, rural mortality rates only started falling behind urban...

Author: Student Taskforce on ACEs and Resilience Board Members Decades of research have revealed the impacts of adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) and trauma – or experiences that overwhelm a person’s ability to cope- on health. Chronic exposure to toxic stress can increase risk of chronic diseases, alter brain structure, impact all body systems, and affect an individual’s ability to learn and function at their full potential. There is a growing movement to equip people working in...

Nicole Wetsman The Red River runs north, up along the border between North Dakota and Minnesota, before spilling into Lake Winnipeg in Manitoba, Canada. Its water flows slowly through a 10,000-year-old glacial lakebed, in one of the flattest stretches of land in the United States, and because it points north, it’s sometimes blocked by ice jams—all of which makes the river prone to flooding . In March 2009, one such flood threatened the city of Fargo. Residents watched for a week as the...

We developed ACEs Connection's Diversity, Equity & Inclusion Tool — called the Inclusion Tool, for short — to ensure that ACEs initiatives across the world focus on being inclusive when forming a steering committee, recruiting leaders, providing education about ACEs science, recruiting members, or providing resources and services within their communities. The more inclusive your ACEs initiative is, the more diverse it will be, giving your initiative a real shot at achieving equity and...

Thank you Governor DeSantis (and Zack Gibson in the Governor’s Office) for declaring today as Florida’s Trauma Informed Care Day . Many of Florida’s most costly, intractable social problems including our opioid and substance dependency crisis, our sky-rocketing public health costs, tragic school failures, and the multigenerational cycle of families into our criminal justice and child welfare systems, can be decreased by addressing early trauma. Initiatives are taking shape at both the state...

When we are Emotion Phobic / Emo-phobic we do not see trauma or child abuse and avoid being trauma-informed. And this implies we are afraid and avoid our very self. And this is why change is so slow. The black sheep of the family gets picked on for this reason and in schools the administration who may well be Emo-Phobic let bullies have their way with little intervention. Bullies bully to avoid their own pain and this applies to every strata and occupation in society Why I Bully You ...

Dr. Mimi Graham is Florida’s Johnny Appleseed, but instead of planting apple trees, she’s been seeding hundreds of ACEs-science-informed schools, courts, juvenile detention centers, hospitals, childcare centers, home visiting programs, mental health agencies, law enforcement agencies, and drug treatment centers. Graham, who has served as director of the Florida State University Center for Prevention and Early Intervention Policy in Tallahassee since 1993, focuses on early childhood,...

Jane Stevens will be the special guest this Sunday evening on the "Breaking the Silence with Dr. Gregory Williams" radio program. The LIVE radio program begins at 8:00 pm CST, Oct. 27, 2019, and the entire hour will be dedicated to Jane and her work with ACEs Connection. The "Breaking the Silence" radio show has over 1.6 million weekly listeners to the LIVE program and then the show goes to over 110 podcast networks around the world the following week. The host of the program is Dr. Gregory...

Last week, three pediatricians — with a combined experience of 15 years integrating ACEs science into their practices — reflected on the urgency they felt several years ago that prompted them to begin screening patients for childhood adversity and resilience when there was practically no guidance at all. Along their journey , they accumulated a list of lessons learned for other pediatricians and family clinics to use. The three pediatricians participated in the ACEs Connection webinar,...

An ACEs Connection webinar co-sponsored with 4 CA In 2017, California became the first state in the country to pass a law supporting universal screening for adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) in the 5.3 million children in the state’s Medicaid program. As clinicians around California await the state’s announcement of what this new policy will entail, many are wondering what it takes to integrate ACEs science in a pediatric practice. Meet Drs. Deirdre Bernard-Pearl, R.J. Gillespie and...