January 2019

When Suzanne O’Connor first joined the Philadelphia ACE Task Force (PATF)—a group then composed mostly of pediatricians who wanted to put ACE science into practice—she did more listening than talking.

My grandfather is traditionally masculine in most senses of the word: He was a soldier, then a bait-shop owner, then a garbage collector; he rose before dawn most days of his life and I never heard him complain about it. He raised six good kids, he tells funny one-liners, he’s an expert fisherman. He once refused over-the-counter pain meds even while at death’s door. I’ve been thinking about him lately, for reasons I’ll get to in a bit. More than a decade ago, the American Psychological...

As Los Angeles County continues efforts to move its juvenile justice system in a direction that emphasizes diversion over incarceration, supervisors hope to leverage arts programming as part of a broader set of reforms. Arts-oriented programming has long played a role in the nation’s largest juvenile justice systems, but L.A. County leaders hope a grant from one of the nation’s leading funders will expand these services. A one-year, $750,000 grant from the Ford Foundation’s Art for Justice...

After the deadly shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in February, Brevard County Schools Assistant Superintendent Matt Reed faced a challenge unlike any in his career. His team had to find, hire and train more than two dozen new employees to carry firearms on school campuses and protect students in the event of a school shooter. They had less than six months. The district missed the deadline. [For more on this story by Katherine Campione, Vincent McDonald and Christina Morales,...

Help for breaking free of the victim-mindset; Bob Lancer's Exit Victim Thinking audio on youtube

Early bird registration ends soon for the 2019 AAP Trauma Informed Pediatric Provider (TIPP) Course scheduled March 2-5, 2019 in San Antonio, TX. Learn from other pediatric healthcare providers about the recent science, evidence base and treatments of adversity, resiliency and toxic stress. AAP Past-President, Dr. Colleen Kraft, will deliver the keynote presentation Pediatricians as Leaders in Addressing Toxic Stress and Trauma in Children . For more information, a schedule of speakers and...

Studies have long linked childhood trauma to increased risk and occurrence of adult psychiatric disorders, but many of these studies were retrospective and relied on adult participants’ ability to recall events that had taken place decades earlier. To offset the risk of recall bias and forgetting that accompanies retrospective studies, researchers in the Great Smoky Mountains Study took a different approach: they tracked participants from childhood to age 30 through a series of regularly...

Mass incarceration . Private, for-profit prisons . Laws that unfairly target minorities . Defendants being sentenced to decades for nonviolent and first-time offenses . Overcrowding. Corruption . The issues facing our correctional facilities are myriad. And, with over six million either incarcerated or on some form of community supervision, the United States has become the world's leading incarcerator. Despite recent media friendly reforms like the First Step Act , there’s still an long way...

Wealth concentration in the United States—which is intensifying across the board—has impacted minority groups the hardest. That is the thesis of a new report from the Institute for Policy Studies, a left-leaning think tank based in Washington, D.C. Utilizing data from the Federal Reserve, Bureau of Labor Statistics and Forbes rich lists, among other sources, the institute found that the 400 richest Americans hold more wealth than “all Black households, plus a quarter of Latino households...

Of all the questions I get asked every day, the one that crystallizes just how simplistic and uninformed the conversation about immigration is this: “Why can’t you just get legal?” You ask what you don’t know. When it comes to immigration, most Americans I’ve met across the country—online and offline, from people calling for my deportation to people who want me to stay—don’t know a whole lot. Even journalists who cover the issue struggle to report and frame it outside a largely partisan,...

SAN DIEGO — Migrants who are allowed to remain in the United States to pursue asylum are usually given a choice when they are released from detention in San Diego: Go to the Greyhound bus station and fend for themselves, or try to find a cot and a shower at a local shelter. One way or another, once the migrants have been dropped off by discreet white Immigration and Customs Enforcement vans in border towns across the Southwest, they are no longer the federal government’s problem. President...

When I was 15, my mother died in a car accident. Not knowing how to deal with the enormity of my loss and grief, I threw myself into homework and activities, never missing a day of school and trying to control everything in my life. This strategy succeeded in some ways—I was able to get good grades, for example. But the inner cost of pushing away my grief and sadness showed up in other ways. I became anxious around things I couldn’t control, like unexpected changes of plans and minor...