January 2016

The Texas Legislature meets every other year. For 140 calendar days. The state’s legislative agenda is so densely packed that keeping track of any policy area, mental health included, is a dizzying task. This summary tells you what you need to know about bills that were passed, commissions that were formed, and reforms that were pushed. Funding for Veterans Caring for our nation’s veterans is one issue that the entire legislature can support. This legislative session was no...

Despite recent improvements to their training, a new study in the journal of Police and Criminal Psychologysuggests the police are as susceptible as the general public to holding false beliefs about psychology that apply to their work. The research, conducted in the UK, also showed that police officers have more confidence than the public in their false beliefs. Chloe Chaplin, a programme facilitator at the London Probation Trust, and Julia Shaw, senior lecturer at South Bank university,...

By Emma Brown January 17  Her eighth-grade classmate kept asking her to have sex in the bathroom. Tired of the badgering, she asked a teacher’s aide for help, and the aide outlined a plan: Lure the boy. Meet him in the bathroom. Catch him in the act. The 14-year-old girl agreed, but the impromptu sting operation went horribly wrong. Inside a bathroom stall at their Alabama middle school, the boy forced himself on her before anyone showed up to stop him. When nurses treated her,...

   Mobilizing Action for Resilient Communities (MARC) is a learning collaborative of 14 communities committed to building resilience and addressing childhood trauma through an explicit application of the Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs) science, language, and data. MARC is coordinated by the Health Federation of Philadelphia with support from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and The California Endowment. You can read more about MARC  here.   They were curious,...

The Impact of ACEs Healthcare Here is where I need to use the word REVOLUTION. I believe the greatest possible impact for using the ACE Study to improve the lives of our entire world today lies in the Pediatric segment. There have been some breakthroughs in this arena…but to my way of thinking…not quick enough. And no, it’s not the ACE score of the children I am referencing, but the use of the ACE questionnaire with the parents…ALL parents! The only way to change...

Scientists at the Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis analyzed the brain scans of 105 children ages 7 to 12 and found that key structures in the brain are connected differently in poor children than in kids raised in more affluent settings. In particular, the brain's hippocampus, associated with learning, memory, and the regulation of stress, and the amygdala, which is linked to stress and emotion, connect to other areas of the brain differently in poor children than in...

A landmark study of the lasting and destructive effects of childhood trauma provides guidance with the potential to significantly improve the well-being of untold millions of people who have been, or will be, abused, neglected or similarly harmed. And the financial savings could be dramatic. "The implications are revolutionary," says David S. Lauterbach, a trauma expert who is president and CEO of the Kent Center, in Warwick. "When you think about the long-term permutations, it boggles the...

In our quest to get things done, we might be missing something, or rather someone, very important: ourselves. That is, in trying to get everything checked off our to-do lists, we might neglect our needs. We might sacrifice sleep. We might work overtime without much, if any, rest. We might feel the pressure to schedule every minute of our day, believing that we should be doing and going all the time. In other words, we get so caught up in being productive, effective and efficient that we run...

How do bad things that happen to little girls shape their lives as women? The science of adverse childhood experiences is growing, and the findings are sobering. And – it’s not just the experiences that first come to mind, such as child abuse. It’s far more than that. We know that when some children experience a negative event when they are young, they are more prone to developmental and mental health problems. But, about 15 years ago, a small group of researchers and...

T habiti Boone grew up in a neighborhood where fathers didn’t exist, he says. The few who were physically present weren’t there spiritually or emotionally. “I never saw dads in the park playing with their sons,” Boone recalls. In his own life, Boone, a native of Brooklyn, N.Y., says that his father was present but not there. A star high school basketball player, Boone says his father came to only one of his games. “I don’t remember my father hugging me. We...

As therapists, we too often fail to recognize that significant changes in a person’s inner state don’t always lead to desired changes in performance. Early on in my work with performance blocks, I was struck by how often the root of the problem could be traced to traumatic experiences, especially with athletes. One of the most common athletic performance blocks I treat is something called the yips, the loss by an accomplished athlete of an ability to perform a seemingly simple...

The extent to which trauma in childhood – from a parent’s divorce to a relative’s mental illness or abuse – affects a child’s development and causes problems deep into adult life has been revealed in a landmark study. Being exposed to difficult experiences as a young person alters how children’s brains grow and how their immune and hormone systems develop, the authors found. Cancer , heart disease, mental illness, drug use, smoking, binge drinking and...