October 2018

Parents who have experienced adverse childhood experiences (ACEs), such as abuse, neglect, or household dysfunction, are more likely than parents without these experiences to have children with behavioral health problems, according to an analysis of data from several large, nationally representative surveys of US households that addressed ACEs and children’s behavioral problems and diagnoses. Of the more than 2500 children for whom researchers had data, one-fifth had a parent who reported...

Female physicians continue to face myriad challenges in medicine ranging from implicit bias to gaps in payment and promotion to sexual harassment. So it is not surprising (though it’s still appalling) that although equal numbers of men and women now graduate from medical school, only a small fraction of female physicians become medical leaders. Currently in the US, only 3% of healthcare CEOs are women, 6% are department chairs, 9% are division chiefs, and 3% are serving as chief medical...

The thing about something like fatphobia is that it touches every part of your life. It shapes what you desire. It molds your personality. It changes the trajectory of your dreams. You lose sight of which part is you and which part is it. I mean honestly that's true for all of us for one reason or another. You never get to know what your story could be if it hadn’t been touched by gender education or racism or all those years that someone made fun of your knees or a lifetime of being told...

NEW YORK , Oct. 2, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- With reports of discrimination and hate crimes on the rise, psychiatrists and other mental health professionals say they feel compelled to retool their practices as "safe spaces" where they can better attend to the needs of traumatized patients. This is the main conclusion of a report from psychiatrists at NYU School of Medicine and the University of California San Francisco , publishing online Oct. 2 in The American Journal of Psychiatry. After the...

The JPB Research Network on Toxic Stress , led by Dr. Jack Shonkoff, is working on developing biological and behavioral markers for adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) and resilience that they believe will be able to measure to what extent a child is experiencing toxic stress, and what effect that stress may be having on the child’s brain and development. The JPB Research Network on Toxic Stress is comprised of scientists, pediatricians and community leaders, and is a project of the Center...

Late in the evening on Jan. 27, 2004, four teenagers broke into an elderly neighbor’s house in the Southern California town of Perris, looking for cash. One of them, Shawn Khalifa, guarded the back door. Shawn, who had just turned 15, slipped into the kitchen and stole some chocolate candies. He briefly saw that the homeowner was seriously hurt, and he ran back outside. No one accused Shawn of laying a hand on the victim, Hubert Love, 77, but a jury convicted the teenager of first-degree...

Gov. Jerry Brown on Sunday signed a pair of measures that limits when and how young people can be prosecuted for criminal charges. It continues Brown’s efforts, in his final term, to undo many of the tough sentencing policies he supported during his first stint as governor, which contributed to an unconstitutionally overcrowded prison system in California. Senate Bill 439 establishes 12 years as the minimum age for prosecution in juvenile court , unless a minor younger than 12 has committed...

UNITED NATIONS (AP) — In a pivotal week for women in the United States, the U.N. put forth its own clarion set of female voices at its annual meeting of nations. And women’s empowerment was only one of their rallying cries. At the U.N. General Assembly, the first since the #metoo movement took root in Fall 2017 and began to amplify women’s voices in a new way, some of the most powerful words have come from the mouths of female leaders, a group whose numbers, influence and ambitions for the...

Today (October 1), marks the first day of Breast Cancer Awareness Month . While White women are most likely to develop breast cancer, the American Cancer Society reports that Black women are most likely to die from it . That’s especially true for Black women under 35 , who are twice as likely to have it and three times as likely to never recover. The AMBER Consortium is analyzing the four largest studies of breast cancer in Black women to discover genetic and other risk factors that underlie...

I loved my upcoming interview with ACEs Connection member, Emily Read Daniels, founder of HereThisNow! Please join us this Friday at 7:00 pm (or download to listen any time) as we discuss trauma-informed trainings, workshops, speaking, blogging, and so much more. Be sure to check out their course offerings and upcoming retreats.

While many organizations are trauma-informed, becoming trauma-responsive means looking at every aspect of an organization’s programming, environment, language, and values and involving all staff in better serving clients who have experienced trauma. Moving from Trauma-Informed to Trauma-Responsive: A Training Program for Organizational Change provides program administrators and clinical directors with key resources needed to train staff and make organizational changes to become...

Children who are abused might carry the imprint of that trauma in their cells—a biochemical marking that is detectable years later, according to new research from the University of British Columbia and Harvard University. The findings, based on a comparison of chemical tags on the DNA of 34 adult men, still need confirmation from larger studies, and researchers don't know if this tagging—known as methylation—affects the victims' health. But the difference in methylation between those who had...