When Dr. Nadine Burke Harris set up the Bayview Child Health Center in 2007, she immediately noticed an association between traumatic experiences and health outcomes in the children she treated.
“Day after day I saw infants who were listless and had strange rashes,” she writes in her new book, The Deepest Well: Healing the Long-Term Effects of Childhood Adversity. “Kids just entering middle school had depression. And in unique cases…kids weren’t even growing.”
Often, she discovered, these children had suffered “heart-wrenching trauma,” such sexual abuse, violence, or parental mental illness and incarceration. These are what researchers call “adverse childhood experiences”—or ACEs, for short. To understand what she was seeing in her clinic, Dr. Harris searched the scientific literature for evidence about the connection between experience and health—and discovered that the impact of an ACE went well beyond childhood, leading to more physical and mental illness in adulthood.
[For more on this story by JEREMY ADAM SMITH, go to https://greatergood.berkeley.e..._of_childhood_trauma]
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