February 2019

This new technical assistance tool from the Center for Health Care Strategies (CHCS) offers a variety of approaches for screening adults and children for adverse childhood experiences and trauma, including examples of screening protocols used at several provider practices that have embraced trauma-informed care.

Childhood trauma is at the root of many challenges New Mexico faces: from the opioid crisis, to community violence to poor school achievement and unemployment. This makes childhood trauma an expensive problem, forcing state legislators, city mayors, council members, county commissioners and school board members to divert valuable tax dollars to deal with the impact. But it doesn't have to be this way. We have identified the problem and we have the solution. In fact, the causes of childhood...

Those of us who have suffered with ACE’s have the most difficult time dealing with falling in love. We seem to fall most deeply in love with the most unavailable people, or with people capable of hurting us the most. As a consequence, we may wall ourselves off from the experience of falling in love, out of fear. Or, we continue to futilely and painfully seek someone to gratify the deep desire for intimate acceptance that is inflamed by falling in love. In this article we will explore another...

Hundreds of genes have been newly linked to depression, shedding light on the origins of the condition and highlighting personality types that could be at risk. The international study, involving more than two million people, is the largest of its kind. It could inform treatments for the condition, which affects one in five people in the UK and is the leading cause of disability worldwide. Scientists led by the University of Edinburgh studied information pooled from three large datasets of...

Ashoor Rasho has spent more than half his life alone in a prison cell in Illinois — 22 to 24 hours a day. The cell was so narrow he could reach his arms out and touch both walls at once. "It was pretty broke down — the whole system, the way they treated us," says the 43-year-old Rasho, who has been diagnosed with several mental health conditions, including severe depression, schizophrenia and borderline personality disorder. Rasho says little things would trigger him, and he'd react...

As the nation responds to an escalating polysubstance use crisis, many Appalachian communities have placed renewed focus on comprehensive harm reduction via needle and syringe exchange programs (SEPs). According to the Centers for Disease Control, rates of acute hepatitis C (HCV) increased over 400 percent among Americans ages 20–29 between 2004–2014, presumably as a result of sharing syringes during injection drug use. Similar trends have been observed in Virginia, leading the former state...

Mindfulness meditation has long been touted as a way to reduce stress and pain. More recently, it also has gained traction as a tool to improve our relationships, helping us to be more kind and less biased and angry when we regularly practice it. Yet when we talk about mindful meditation, often we are thinking about a combination of practices that have been taught together for millennia. These might include breath awareness—focusing on your breath and letting thoughts and feelings pass by...

A new joint Yale–University of Pennsylvania study found that there is an extreme lack of violence intervention services for victims of gun-related violence. Published in JAMA Surgery on Jan. 23, the collaborative effort by Yale and Penn researchers used data concerning firearm injuries treated at emergency departments in the United States from 2009 to 2014 to reach this conclusion. “Our study suggests that only 20 percent of all firearm injury victims are eligible for receiving any...

The many headlines devoted to America’s large prison population have thrust the issue of mass incarceration into the spotlight. However, they may also have diverted attention from a closely related problem: the even larger number of Americans on parole and probation. A leading funder of evidence-based work to improve public policy has teamed up with a top operating foundation to launch a major initiative aimed at transforming parole and probation , with an eye toward reducing prison...

This month, dozens of governors across the country are being inaugurated—some for their first time, others after years in office. As they assume the mantle of the highest office in their states, they have a critical role to play: protect the right to vote. Today, nearly six million people, mostly Black and Brown people, are blocked from voting by various forms of felony disenfranchisement. All but two states, Maine and Vermont, limit access to the polls for those with criminal justice...

The feeling of having a healthy supply of self-worth is something I can only imagine might have been more readily available, natural and automatic if I was able to see that in myself as a child. As an adult survivor of childhood abuse, self-worth was not supplied in healthy doses while growing up.

In looking at the impact of childhood trauma, you can’t get much clearer than this: In 2017, ACEs among Tennessee adults led to an estimated $5.2 billion in direct medical costs and lost productivity from employees missing work. That’s just one year, according to the new report, “ The Economic Cost of ACEs in Tennessee ," released on Feb. 1, 2019 by The Sycamore Institute in Nashville, Tenn. And to provide some perspective, $5.2 billion is one-seventh of the state’s annual budget . This $5.2...